The Road To Wellville (DVD)

...johns and sock suspenders, extolling the virtues of vegetarianism and colonic irrigation and electric shock treatment, but for some reason I never got around to watching it.

That’s the beauty of television though – you’re at a loose end one evening, and lo and behold, you happen to glance at the listings and a film just jumps out at you... and if you like plenty of puerile humour (fart jokes, perverted German doctors, ...
...to present), then this is the film for you. I enjoyed it, and what really surprised me was the strength of the cast – Anthony Hopkins, John Cusack, Matthew Broderick, Dana Carvey, Bridget Fonda and a host of other familiar faces playing it for laughs and clearly enjoying themselves.

Broderick and Fonda play an unhappy couple, William and Eleanor Lightbody, who are on their way to Battle Creek to visit the fabled Sanitarium run ... more

I remember seeing posters advertising this film when it was released in 1994, and I even have vague recollections of Barry Norman not being entirely complimentary about it, late at night on BBC1. My lasting memory was of a buck-toothed Anthony Hopkins prancing about in long johns and sock suspenders, extolling the virtues of vegetarianism and colonic irrigation and electric shock treatment, but for some reason I never got around to watching it.

That’s the beauty of television though – you’re at a loose end one evening, and lo and behold, you happen to glance at the listings and a film just jumps out at you... and if you like plenty of puerile humour (fart jokes, perverted German doctors, basically taking the mickey out of health fads from past to present), then this is the film for you. I enjoyed it, and what really surprised me was the strength of the cast – Anthony Hopkins, John Cusack, Matthew Broderick, Dana Carvey, Bridget Fonda and a host of other familiar faces playing it for laughs and clearly enjoying themselves.

Broderick and Fonda play an unhappy couple, William and Eleanor Lightbody, who are on their way to Battle Creek to visit the fabled Sanitarium run by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (Anthony Hopkins), to try and start solving their problems by purifying and cleaning their bodies. Yes, he was THAT Kellogg, the same man who gave the world its original and best breakfast cereal. This forerunner of the health farm was run on almost fanatically puritanical lines – being a committed carnivore, I’m not sure of the distinction between vegetarian and vegan, but this place brooked no argument. You are constantly reminded of Dr. Kellogg’s belief that meat was unbelievably bad for you, including a ‘scientific’ demonstration of the correlation between the bacteria in raw meat and those in horse manure!

The diet of vegetables was intended to purify body (more specifically, bowels) and soul, but to aid the cleansing of the former, Kellogg also put his patients on a strict regime of rectal purging. Which was nice. Sexual activity in any form was frowned upon, which naturally gives rise to a whole series of amusing, yet admittedly childish, jokes about and references to sex and masturbation. Well, they made me smile anyway... :-)

However, the health farm is an oasis of purity in the midst of a filth-ridden town – the Kellogg invention of breakfast cereal has spawned a whole host of imitators, all of which are based in Battle Creek, vying to grab a piece of the Kellogg reputation, fighting for scraps at the bottom of the breakfast bowl. John Cusack plays Charles Ossining, a hopelessly naive young man out to make his fortune, has been given a large sum of money by his aunt and intends to set up his own breakfast cereal factory in the town. However, he has gone into partnership with a charlatan by the name of Goodloe Bender, who seems intent on frittering away vast sums of cash on a 5-star hotel room and plenty of business dinners.

The link between the hopeful young businessman and the austerity of the Sanitarium comes in the form of George Kellogg, the troublesome adopted son of the great doctor. It is said in the film that he and his wife adopted a great many children – and also that Kellogg never indulged in the pleasures of the flesh, due to suffering from polio as a child, and consequently was convinced that man could survive quite happily by abstaining from intimate contact with the fairer sex. That aside, George has gone quite spectacularly off the rails, giving Dana Carvey the chance to reprise the socially-challenged character he perfected as Garth in ‘Wayne’s World’. In fact, I haven’t seen Dana Carvey play any other sort of character...

Anyway, George is a bum and an alcoholic, but Ossining and Bender see him as the perfect way to make their fortune – they can use the Kellogg name to market their Perfo brand of breakfast cereal, and con people into believing that it is actually the real thing. Of course, you know it will probably all go horribly wrong, but the film keeps your attention right to the end, by throwing in a mixture of beer, bodice-ripping (all in the name of emancipation and good health, obviously), mad ginger vegetarian quacks and some, er, hands-on therapy.

‘The Road to Wellville’ isn’t just a series of cheap gags though. There is some attempt made to go a bit deeper into the reasons why the Lightbodys have had to come to the Sanitarium, and why George Kellogg so railed against his adoptive father’s authority and teachings. In fact, Hopkins mournful musings on why his son disobeys him reminded me a little of that scene in ‘Nixon’, where he asks Kissinger, ‘Why do they hate me?’ That said, I laughed pretty much from start to finish, and if nothing else, this film will ensure that you never look at a box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes in quite the same way again!
 

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