The Wrong Box is a 1966 British comedy film produced and directed by Bryan Forbes from a screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove, based on the 1889 novel The Wrong Box by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. It was made by Salamander Film Productions and distributed by Columbia Pictures.
The cast includes a number of Britain's leading actors and comic actors of the time, including John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Peter Sellers, Irene Handl, Nanette Newman, Wilfrid Lawson, and Tony Hancock. Included in the cast are other actors who later became more well-known, including John Le Mesurier, John Junkin, Leonard Rossiter, Nicholas Parsons, Jeremy Lloyd, Graham Stark, Thorley Walters, Norman Rossington, David Lodge, Juliet Mills, and Norman Bird. Cicely Courtneidge also appears, as Salvation Army Major Martha and The Temperance Seven also appear (as themselves).
In the early 19th century, a lawyer explains to a group of young boys that a tontine has been organised in which £1,000 has been invested in the name of each child (£20,000 in total) and that the last survivor will win the accrued total of all invested sums. We then see a series of accidental deaths, explaining the demise of various members of the group.
63 years later, in Victorian London, elderly brothers Masterman (John Mills) and Joseph Finsbury (Ralph Richardson), who live next to each other, are the last surviving members of the tontine. Masterman is attended by his unpromising medical student grandson, Michael Finsbury (Michael Caine), who is sent next door to summon Joseph where he is greeted by his cousin Julia (Nanette Newman). They have seen each other often on the street and admired each other. She explains Joseph is in Bournemouth with her cousins. They talk in a room containing a large collection of eggs of different species.
Meanwhile, his greedy cousins Morris (Peter Cook) and John (Dudley Moore), receive a telegram from Michael in their boarding house in Bournemouth, saying that Masterman is dying. Masterman hasn't talked to his despised brother in many years.
On the train trip to London, Joseph escapes from his grandson minders, entering a compartment, and boring the sole occupant with a diatribe of trivial facts about the history of knitting (the silent man is knitting). His traveling companion later turns out to be the "Bournemouth Strangler." Joseph leaves to smoke a cigarette, leaving behind his coat,
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