Among John Cleese's many achievements, A Fish Called Wanda is perhaps most notable for its bracing air of emotional honesty. While occasionally hinting at the surrealist anarchy of Monty Python and the manic-depressive farce of Fawlty Towers, mostly thanks to the hilarious antics of Kevin Kline and Michael Palin, it is at all times grounded by the quiet desperation and longing of Cleese's Archie Leach. The unhappily married barrister's life begins to improve when he falls in with a gangster's moll. Nowhere else in Cleese's work will you find anything quite as honest or heartfelt as the love scene between Leach and Jamie Lee Curtis's Wanda. He tells her that she makes him feel free. "You see, Wanda, we're all terrified of embarrassment," he says. "That's why we're so dead. Most of my friends are dead, you know. We have these piles of corpses to dinner. But you're alive, God bless you, and I want to be." A Fish Called Wanda screens at Rooftop Cinemas tonight and will be followed tomorrow by Withnail & I, a cult classic in its own right. Long before Bernard Black started peddling books from behind a half-empty bottle and a haze of cigarette smoke, Richard E. Grant's Withnail was taking a seat in a country tea room and demanding the finest wines available to humanity. "We want them here and we want them now!" he cries in the film's most famous and quoted scene. It remains the role for which Grant is best known and the film has long provided the model for wine-soaked share houses and out-of-work actors everywhere.

Review, 6 March 2010