If style makes the man in Nothing but the Best, the same could be said for the movie itself. Arrivisme and the stagnation of the English Establishment are pretty common themes these days, as in Room at the Top and Beyond the Fringe; combining the two would seem to promise a one-way ticket to banality. Yet brisk pacing and some bright humor manage to save Nothing.

The people at the Exeter have done their attraction a disservice by labeling it "wicked, witty satire." Witty it is; wickedly satirical it certainly isn't. On the one hand, England's upperclass elite is painted as being comprised of persons wearing the right tie, speaking the proper accent, boasting at least four quarterings of nobility, and lacking any suspicion of brains or talent. Yet both this society, and an ambitious young man's relentless efforts to crash it, are viewed with a benign complacency that weakens any satiric intent.

A Hired Tutor

Setting out to acquire at least the tie and the accent, the young man hires, or rather keeps, as his tutor an aristocrat (Denholm Elliott) whose family has banished him, for some reason or other, from polite society. The ensuing scenes of a rouge's education provide some of the film's funniest moments, crisply flattening Oxford, Cambridge, and a variety of upper-class attitudes.

Nor is our no-longer-quite-so-underling above having a go at marrying the boss' daughter; and since her fiance of record at the outset is a buck-toothed, horse-faced, pompous young peer, so much the better. (Daughter--played by Millicent Martin--seems somehow to have avoided the quasigenetic blight of the elite; she is attractive, intelligent, and spirited enough to reconcile even a John Osborne.)

And Then Chaos

From here on the story becomes chaotic, centering on the murder of tutor by tutee (quite a dramatic step, actually, for so calculating a fellow). Although the corpse is discovered at film's end, the fate of the young man, happily, is left a question mark. What, if anything, this is supposed to show, is not at all clear, nor even whether it's a case of cleverness or indecision on the director's part; but at least the viewer is spared the disappointment of seeing vice rendered its just desserts.

For all its weaknesses, though Nothing is an engaging try. After a slow start, Bates as the charming man-on-the-make carries the film swiftly along, and Elliot's portrayal of down-at-the-heels gentility is deft and assured. Only the ungenerous will complain that the bite of satire loses out to the geniality of humor.