There's a lot wrong with The Wrong Box, and a lot that's right, too….

The script by Larry Gelbart and Bert Shevelove (would that the former had labored alone) is much too smarty-pants. It begins with a wholesale bumping off, one by one, of British eccentrics, a la Kind Hearts and Coronets, but sans that fine film's wit….

The film's climax is a chase involving horse-drawn hearses which ends with horseplay in a cemetery, which is not my idea of fun, a variety of sight gags, old and new, notwithstanding. Farce that wasn't always funny and never witty is the [film's] commodity….

[Whether] the good acting in The Wrong Box will compensate for its unfunny farce or not depends on how magnanimous you're feeling when you see it.

Ivor Howard, "Film Reviews: 'The Wrong Box'," in Films in Review (copyright © 1966 by the National Board of Review in Motion...