Facial Farceur

A Matter of WHO. British Comic Terry-Thomas wears his upper teeth parted in the middle. His mustache looks like a displaced divot. His eyes seem to give him trouble; the irises spin about like berserk marbles. His brow crinkles and uncrinkles like an accordion. Terry-Thomas, born Thomas Terry Hoar-Stevens, is one of nature's funnymen, and a good part of the pleasure of his movie company consists in watching him juggle his face.

The juggling act is on again in A Matter of WHO, but his growing claque of admirers is in for a new and slightly unsettling experience, a half-serious Terry-Thomas. In this film, Terry-Thomas works for WHO, short for the World Health Organization, and his job turns out to be no laughing matter.

When an oilman named Cooper (Cyril Wheeler) planes into London with a case of smallpox, and some other seemingly unrelated cases develop, it becomes Terry-Thomas feverish chore to track down the carrier. In no time, several other plot strings become chronically entangled. Cooper's bride, Michele, played by a sensuous brunette named Sonja Ziemann, turns out to be a woman with a cloudy past. And before long there are intimations that poor old Cooper is also being victimized by an oil swindle. The bowler-hatted Terry-Thomas and Cooper's gangling American business partner (Alex Nicol) team up,_ Mutt-and-Jeff fashion, to pursue the viruses and the villains. This includes such high jinks as Terry-Thomas' impersonating a hearse driver and tooling off madly with the coffin of a Moslem diplomat, and a terribly dignified monkey who impersonates live diplomats. The distinctly chilly climax occurs in a cable car high above the Alps.

Despite a surprising amount of documentation of the serious work of WHO, the comic know-HOW of Terry-Thomas makes the movie a light, diverting jape.

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