Down Among the Z Men is a B/W

Black-and-white

Black-and-white, often abbreviated B/W or B&W, is a term referring to a number of monochrome forms in visual arts.Black-and-white as a description is also something of a misnomer, for in addition to black and white, most of these media included varying shades of gray...

 1952 British comedy

Comedy

Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...

 film starring The Goons; Spike Milligan

Spike Milligan

Terence Alan Patrick Seán "Spike" Milligan Hon. KBE was a comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, soldier and actor. His early life was spent in India, where he was born, but the majority of his working life was spent in the United Kingdom. He became an Irish citizen in 1962 after the...

, Peter Sellers

Peter Sellers

Richard Henry Sellers, CBE , known as Peter Sellers, was a British comedian and actor. Perhaps best known as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, he is also notable for playing three different characters in Dr...

, Michael Bentine

Michael Bentine

Michael Bentine CBE was a British comedian, comic actor and founding member of the Goons. A Peruvian Briton by heritage as a result of his father's nationality, In 1971 Bentine received the Order of Merit of Peru because of his fund-raising work for the 1970 Great Peruvian...

 and Harry Secombe

Harry Secombe

Sir Harry Donald Secombe CBE was a Welsh entertainer with a talent for comedy and a noted fine tenor singing voice. He is best known for playing Neddie Seagoon, the central character in the BBC radio comedy series The Goon Show...

.

Plot

Harry Jones (Secombe) is a clerk in Mr. Crab's general mercantile store and an amateur actor in community theatre, where he is currently playing a Scotland Yard inspector, "Batts of the Yard". When the absentminded Prof. Osrick Purehart (Bentine) leaves a secret military formula in the store, mayhem ensues as two suspicious secret agents, who have been shadowing the professor, question Harry regarding the formula.

In an attempt to return the formula to the professor, Harry goes to an Army post, Camp Warwell, where he is mistakenly enlisted in the Z Men, ostensibly an elite unit guarding atomic secrets but in reality a ragtag group of reservists, retreads, and others of marginal (at best) competence. One of the "secret service men", in reality the enemy spies, kidnap and impersonate an adjutant

Adjutant

Adjutant is a military rank or appointment. In some armies, including most English-speaking ones, it is an officer who assists a more senior officer, while in other armies, especially Francophone ones, it is an NCO , normally corresponding roughly to a Staff Sergeant or Warrant Officer.An Adjutant...

 newly assigned to the camp.

The post’s commander, Colonel Bloodnok (Sellers), has been assigned for security purposes a supposed "daughter" (Carole Carr) who is actually a female MI5

MI5

The Security Service, commonly known as MI5 , is the United Kingdom's internal counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its core intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service focused on foreign threats, Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence...

 operative. Harry soon becomes smitten with the "daughter," and they work together to foil an attempt by the secret agents to purloin Prof. Pureheart’s formula.

Production

Down Among the Z Men is the only film starring all four Goons; Bentine was absent from the 1951 Penny Points to Paradise

Penny Points to Paradise

Penny Points to Paradise is a 1951 comedy feature film. The film was the feature film debut of the stars of The Goon Show, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers....

. In the film, Bentine, Milligan and Sellers repeated their radio characters, whereas Secombe’s Neddy Seagoon was replaced with a less-raucous Harry Jones.

The production was shot over a two-week shooting schedule. Milligan, who wrote most of the radio scripts for the Goons, had no role creating in the film’s screenplay. Bentine would later tell an interviewer that film’s lack of financing required director Maclean Rogers to only permit one take per scene. Rogers, however, incorporated two dance numbers into the film featuring showgirls as female soldiers practicing for a talent show.

Release

Down Among the Z Men was not a commercial success in Great Britain. Since The Goons were unknown in the United States at the time, there was no theatrical release to the American market. Years later, after Sellers became a major film star, bootleg 16mm prints of the film began to turn up in the U.S., sometimes under the new title The Goon Show Movie.