Wednesday Minute
No. 54 | March 17, 2010

Humour Me

Our theme this week (theme introduction)
British comedies from the 1960s to today

Featured this week
Monday         —   Dr. Strangelove or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Tuesday         —   Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

Three questions, three answers
You have both Brits and Americans in this film.  Besides its London setting, how can you tell this is a British film?

The Otto character, the philosophy-reading, paranoid psychopath played by Kevin Kline.  You don’t have to wonder long to know makes him the way he is.  He’s American.  Otto is the butt of the joke who’s so stupid that he doesn’t even know there was a joke to begin with.  He could be an utterly loathsome character, but his saving grace is that he’s (unwittingly) funny as hell.  Kline gives a great performance, and may have had the last laugh, winning an Oscar for his portrayal.  The Brits responsible for Otto are writer-director Charles Crichton, of Ealing comedy fame, and co-writer John Cleese.  They have stacked the deck, unfairly but to great effect.  Their other American creation, Wanda, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is no bright bulb herself, but she is, on the other hand, utterly charming and likable.  She also has the great benefit of looking like Jamie Lee Curtis.

If the American come off so badly, then the Brits must really shine, right?

Wrong.  The Brits include a double-crossing gangster, a stuttering would-be assassin, a milquetoast barrister, and a supporting cast without a single sympathetic role among them.  But they’re all funny, in their own way, and very British, each of them.  They get what they deserve, more or less, but the film belongs to Cleese’s barrister (Archie Leach, in a nod to Cary Grant) and Wanda, who in the midst of a heist movie-turned-comedy have time for a love affair.

Anything else to say?
There’s this quotation from Charles Crichton worth noting:  “People think that if you’re directing comedy, you’ve got to be funny.  On the contrary, you’ve got to be serious.”  Play it straight and let the audience find what’s funny.  It does work better that way.

Three more from the 1980s

• Gregory’s Girl (1981)
• Brazil (1985)
• Withnail and I (1986)

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Meryl Streep John Cleese Introduces A Fish Called Wanda

“It is—and I think this is a very fair claim—a really mean film.  It’s about greed, lust, envy, hatred, murder, betrayal, paranoia, sanddabs—it has all the elements of comedy—and above all, I’m proud to say, it has masses of violence.”
—John Cleese

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A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
Charles Crichton, director
Trailer

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A Fish Called Wanda
John Cleese (Archie Leach), Jamie Lee Curtis (Wanda Gershwitz), Kevin Kline (Otto), Michael Palin (Ken Pile)

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Quote of Note
Sugar:  I come from this musical family.  My mother is a piano teacher and my father was a conductor.
Joe:  Where did he conduct?
Sugar:  On the Baltimore and Ohio.
—Sugar (Marilyn Monroe), Joe (Tony Curtis), Some Like It Hot (1959)

…58…59…60.

1. KarmaSartre says:

   March 17, 2010 at 2:25 pm

   Also noteworthy for an horrendous sequel. . .