A naive but caring prison chaplain, John Smallwood, is accidentally assigned as vicar to the small and prosperous English country town of Orbiston Parva, in place of an upper-class cleric with the same name, who is favoured by the Despard family, who practically run the town and operate a large factory there. Smallwood's belief incharity and forgiveness sets him at odds with the locals, whose assertions that they are good, Christian people are belied in Smallwood's eyes by their behaviour and ideas. He creates social ructions by appointing a black dustman as his churchwarden, taking in a gypsy family, and persuading local landowner Lady Despard to provide food for the church to distribute free to the people of the town. His scheme spirals out of control and very soon the local traders are up in arms as they have lost all their customers. He tries to explain this to the residents but is besieged in the church hall and only just rescued by the police. As a face-saving act, the Bishop appoints the 'original' Smallwood to the parish and assigns the 'troublemaker' to the Scottish island of 'Ultima Thule'. He is made 'Bishop of Outer Space' to the British space operations based there. But when the intended pilot of the first rocket gets cold feet, Smallwood takes his place. He is last heard broadcasting a sermon over the rocket's radio.
Main cast
Peter Sellers as the Reverend John Edward Smallwood
The cast includes several noteworthy uncredited performers: A Hard Day's Night actor John Junkin, Rodney Bewes, who has a couple of lines as a milkman, and future Small Faces and Humble Pie singer Steve Marriott. Sellers's performance is generally held to be outstanding, in a meatier, more dramatic role, similar to his work inI'm All Right Jack, released in 1959.
Reception
The film premiered in London on 23 May 1963 at the Columbia Cinema in Shaftesbury Avenue, and although it disappointed the critic for The Times, who found it lacking the mild bite and satire of the Boulting-Sellers film I'm All Right Jack, it became one of the 12 most popular films in Britain in 1963.
Analysis
An article in Garden History likened the character of the Reverend John Smallwood to that of an 18th-century picturesque guru William Gilpin: "The first act of the new reverend is to invite a group of colourful travellers to reside in the vicarage; the second is to convince an old lady to open her house and grounds to all sorts of poor vagabonds, scruffs and vagrants, characters who bring picturesque values to the noble scene. Eventually, a picturesque economic system based on free donation causes havoc in the village and the nation - the reverend is made a bishop and sent into space, in Britain's first spaceship. The film revives a character that one can safely imagine as a modern version of Doctor Syntax - cordial, dedicated, stubborn, fearless, not reacting against, but slightly diverging from, the established values of his culture." Like other Boulting films, Heavens Above! satirises contemporary materialistic attitudes and cautiously espouses a socialist ethos, while also showing the possible deleterious side-effects of such ideas, and the all-too-human tendency to take advantage of naive generosity.
