The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1959)
½ — The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1959)
Eleven minutes. That's all it asks of you. Eleven minutes, and I still wanted my time back before it was halfway through.
The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film is barely a film. I don't mean that as a provocative take or a bit of contrarian posturing. I mean it in the most literal, technical sense: what's on screen looks like it was shot on discarded stock that had already been used, stepped on, and left in a damp shed. The visuals are murky, frequently out of focus, and so poorly lit that half the time you're squinting at shapes in a field rather than watching anything resembling a comedy sketch. People talk about lo-fi charm. I like lo-fi charm. This isn't that. This is "did they record it on a potato?"
And then there's the audio. I don't think I'm being precious here. There is a persistent, high-pitched feedback whine running beneath the entire thing, the kind of sound that makes you instinctively check whether your telly is broken. It drones on, scene after scene, making even the fleeting moments of attempted humour physically uncomfortable to sit through. I've watched experimental shorts that deliberately weaponise unpleasant sound design to create meaning. This isn't that either. It just seems like nobody noticed, or nobody cared.
What little content there is amounts to a string of disconnected sketches that mistake randomness for wit. Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan are involved, and I want to be clear: both are capable of genuine, brilliant comedy. There's nothing here that would suggest that to anyone watching for the first time. They wander around fields performing half-baked gags that don't build, don't escalate, and don't pay off. The jokes don't land because they barely take off. They're ideas scribbled on a napkin, maybe funny in the pub where they were conceived, but they needed about ten more drafts before anyone pointed a camera at them. There's no rhythm to any of it. No sense that one moment follows from another for any reason other than the footage happened to be shot on the same day.
The defence I always hear is historical significance. This short, the argument goes, laid the groundwork for Richard Lester's later work with The Beatles, and that work is genuinely great. Fair enough. But that's like praising a mud puddle because it inspired a swimming pool. A thing can be historically interesting and also be terrible. Both can be true simultaneously. The connection to something better downstream doesn't retroactively make the thing itself worth sitting through.
Some films age poorly. This one arrived aged. The amateurism isn't avant-garde daring. It isn't radical lo-fi aesthetics pushing against the conventions of the form. It's just shoddy. There's a difference between a filmmaker making unconventional choices and a filmmaker not having the resources or discipline to make conventional ones and then retroactively calling it a style. I'm not sure which this is, honestly, but the result either way is the same: a viewing experience that is actively unpleasant for all eleven of its interminable minutes.
For context on just how low this sits on my personal scale: I've seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), a film also from that mid-century period, and whatever its limitations it is a model of purposeful craft by comparison. The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film is among the worst shorts I've ever watched, and I say that having sat through Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. At least that film had the decency to be funny for the wrong reasons. This one isn't funny for any reason at all.
Half a star, and I'm being generous.
Rating: ½ | Year: 1959 | Watched: 2026-03-12
Where to watch
Watch in the US
Stream: Criterion Channel
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 1950s: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Invaders from Mars (1953)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
