Withnail & I (1987, Bruce Robinson)
I figured that I’d get the ball rolling with our little chat about weird thumbs, here hare heres and Camberwell carrots.
Withnail & I is a film that, from a personal point of view, I find hard to review totally objectively, such has it’s effect been on my life (there, I’ve said it and might even say precisely why later), but I’ll have a go.
London 1969. One unemployed and one unemployable actor try to clear their heads by going on holiday to a cottage in the Lake District owned by Withnail’s uncle Monty - with tragic-comic consequences.
I must have seen Withnail for the first time around 1990 and it quickly became the second video in my collection (after the original version of Blade Runner). It charmed me: Humour, pathos, social comment, drink, lumpy cigarettes and memorable quotes….oh so many memorable quotes. It’s little wonder that Withnail is such a popular movie with the student population as the squalour that our two protagonists escape from is familiar to anyone who’s ever been shafted by an unscrupulous Landlord.
The film shouldn’t work when you look at it’s component parts:
1. Bruce Robinson was a first time director (he’d previously written the screenplay for The Killing Fields (1984)) and announced, first day on set, that he didn’t know what he was doing so any help would be appreciated.
2. Paul McGann and Richard E Grant were both starring in their first features. To make matters worse, Grant was teetotal so transforming himself into the Hedonistic Withnail meant assuming a method of almost DeNiro-like intensity.
3. The producer, Denis O’Brien, had been behind Life Of Brian and was expecting similar Pythonesque surrealism. He was on Robinson’s case from the beginning and almost shut the production down.
But work it does, and how….
I’d love to discuss individual scenes, thoughts in more depth when a few more people have seen the movie however.
Did you know that the Uncle Monty/Marwood scenes were directly based on Robinson’s own experiences, as a young actor, with famed Italian director Franco Zeffirelli?
Free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can’t…..
I figured that I’d get the ball rolling with our little chat about weird thumbs, here hare heres and Camberwell carrots.
Withnail & I is a film that, from a personal point of view, I find hard to review totally objectively, such has it’s effect been on my life (there, I’ve said it and might even say precisely why later), but I’ll have a go.
London 1969. One unemployed and one unemployable actor try to clear their heads by going on holiday to a cottage in the Lake District owned by Withnail’s uncle Monty - with tragic-comic consequences.
I must have seen Withnail for the first time around 1990 and it quickly became the second video in my collection (after the original version of Blade Runner). It charmed me: Humour, pathos, social comment, drink, lumpy cigarettes and memorable quotes….oh so many memorable quotes. It’s little wonder that Withnail is such a popular movie with the student population as the squalour that our two protagonists escape from is familiar to anyone who’s ever been shafted by an unscrupulous Landlord.
The film shouldn’t work when you look at it’s component parts:
1. Bruce Robinson was a first time director (he’d previously written the screenplay for The Killing Fields (1984)) and announced, first day on set, that he didn’t know what he was doing so any help would be appreciated.
2. Paul McGann and Richard E Grant were both starring in their first features. To make matters worse, Grant was teetotal so transforming himself into the Hedonistic Withnail meant assuming a method of almost DeNiro-like intensity.
3. The producer, Denis O’Brien, had been behind Life Of Brian and was expecting similar Pythonesque surrealism. He was on Robinson’s case from the beginning and almost shut the production down.
But work it does, and how….
I’d love to discuss individual scenes, thoughts in more depth when a few more people have seen the movie however.
Did you know that the Uncle Monty/Marwood scenes were directly based on Robinson’s own experiences, as a young actor, with famed Italian director Franco Zeffirelli?
Free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can’t…..
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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan
"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan