General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Nothing but the Best

Nothing but the Best is a 1964 British black comedy directed by Clive Donner, in which an ambitious working-class estate agent pays a disreputable aristocrat to teach him how to pass as upper class, and stops at nothing, including murder, to climb the social ladder. Frederic Raphael wrote the screenplay, adapting the 1952 short story "The Best of Everything" by the American mystery writer Stanley Ellin, and the film stars Alan Bates, Denholm Elliott, Harry Andrews, and Millicent Martin.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	10 March 1964 (London), distributed by Anglo-Amalgamated; running time 99 minutes³^•¹
Source	"The Best of Everything", a short story by Stanley Ellin first published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in November 1952⁴^•²
Key cast	Alan Bates (Jimmy Brewster), Denholm Elliott (Charlie Prince), Millicent Martin (Ann Horton), Harry Andrews (Mr. Horton)¹
Honors	Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Screenplay (Raphael); BAFTA nomination for British Cinematography (Nicolas Roeg), 1965⁵
Budget	£175,594³
2024 restoration	StudioCanal scanned and restored the original camera negative in 4K; released on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital on 26 August 2024⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Jimmy Brewster (Alan Bates) is a competent, hardworking junior at Horton's, an upmarket estate agency in London's West End taking advantage of the construction boom, but he is ashamed of his working-class background and believes patrician polish would carry him further.⁷ He chances upon Charlie Prince (Denholm Elliott), a well-born but broke and disreputable aristocrat cut off by his wealthy father after being caught forging a cheque, and offers to share his boarding-house room in return for lessons in how to dress, speak, and behave.⁷

The lessons. The tutoring takes the form of a day at Cambridge so Brewster can pose as a graduate, a wine-tasting session, instruction in shooting, and a squash-court scene in which Charlie schools him in what to say about various nationalities and ethnic groups, a scene that earned the 2024 rerelease a trigger warning about historical attitudes.⁷ The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw observes that James acquires his upper-class authenticity less through the lessons than by osmosis: simply keeping the disreputable Charlie in his room as a secret lets him appropriate Charlie's prestige for public show.⁷

The rise. Brewster charms his boss's daughter Ann (Millicent Martin), described in the film as "the only girl in London who says no", away from his well-spoken but dim colleague Hugh (James Villiers), and masterminds a series of property deals that please Mr. Horton (Harry Andrews). He proposes to Ann and is accepted, and arranges for his working-class parents to emigrate to Australia.²^•⁸ Things go wrong when Charlie has a big win on the horses and decides it is time to say goodbye; the story then turns on the murder of tutor by tutee, with the corpse discovered at the film's end and the hero's own fate left as a question mark.²^•⁹

Production and source

The film's English theme came from an American source. Stanley Ellin, who rarely left Brooklyn, set "The Best of Everything" in the United States, but it resonated with Frederic Raphael, an American-born writer who had spent most of his life in Britain. Raphael first adapted it for the ATV anthology Drama '61 on the ITV network, and the story was later used again for a 1981 episode of ITV's Tales of the Unexpected.² The film was produced by David Deutsch for Domino Productions, with George Willoughby as associate producer, photographed by Nicolas Roeg, edited by Fergus McDonell, and scored by Ron Grainer, whose title theme, with lyrics by Raphael, was performed by Millicent Martin.⁴^•⁸

The British Board of Film Classification passed the cinema version, at 97 minutes, on 21 October 1963 with cuts; the uncut 2024 restoration, at 99 minutes 53 seconds, was classified on 18 June 2024 for physical media and streaming.¹⁰

Themes and context

The film belongs to the early-1960s British satire boom and the era's preoccupation with social mobility. A scholarly chapter in Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered by Carolyn Rickards reads it as an early-sixties example of the "aspirational climber", a young man on the make determined to succeed at any cost, presented in the mode of black comedy, and notes that it was released just as color was beginning to enliven British cinema; the opening monologue, delivered direct to camera against deep blue twilight, announces that the "smashing things" Brewster wants are not merely the most expensive but the most colorful.¹¹ Critics have placed it alongside Room at the Top (1959), Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963), and Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley stories as treatments of class ambition and borrowed identity.²^•⁷

Contemporary reception was mixed about its satirical force. A 1964 Harvard Crimson review called it witty but not wickedly satirical, finding that a benign complacency toward both the elite and the climber weakened the satire, while praising Bates's performance and Elliott's "deft and assured" portrayal of down-at-the-heels gentility.⁹ The New Zealand Listener's reviewer awarded four stars, judging that Donner's direction and the acting rose above the literary material even though the screenplay, in his view, lacked heart.¹² Despite its topical subject, the film was not a commercial success on its release in March 1964.⁵

Later reputation and restoration

The film was, in the words of the Vintage Classics release notes, perhaps overlooked at the time amid the rise of British New Wave cinema, and later assessments treat it as undervalued.⁶ For its 60th anniversary, StudioCanal returned to the original camera negative, scanned and restored it in 4K, and produced a new HD master, releasing the film on the Vintage Classics label on 26 August 2024 with extras including a new interview with Frederic Raphael, a 1972 University of London interview with Clive Donner, a stills gallery, and the original trailer.⁶ The Blu-ray presentation, in the 1.66:1 aspect ratio with LPCM 2.0 sound, drew a 5.0-of-5 video rating from Blu-ray.com's reviewer, who described the restoration as stunning in high definition.¹³ The 2024 rerelease also prompted fresh critical attention: Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review gave it four stars and called it "a great time capsule taste of 60s London", noting a cameo by the journalist Bernard Levin playing himself.⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026