I am a big Monty Python fan, but that doesn’t mean I’ve seen everything the Pythons have done separately or together. For example, I somehow had missed A Fish Called Wanda up until now. No, I have no idea how that happened, but I’ll chalk it up the R rating the movie had and how I didn’t see a lot of R-rated movies growing up. As an adult, well, I do what I can to fill in the gaps.
So, that meant it was time to take care of the movie writer/star John Cleese figured would be the closest to a Cary Grant movie he’d ever get to make.
A group of thieves pull off a jewel heist in London. Led by George (Tom Georgeson), the group includes George’s American girlfriend Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis), her gung-ho brother Otto (Kevin Kline), and a local animal lover with a stutter, Ken (Michael Palin). Though the theft goes off without much of a problem, the two Americans are not really playing along with the locals. Otto is Wanda’s lover, not her brother, and a tip to the police gets George arrested. However, George did hide the loot, and the only person who might know where the jewels are is George’s lawyer Archie Leach (Cleese). Wanda has been rather successful using her feminine wiles to get what she wants (she isn’t really all that loyal to Otto either), so why not do to Archie what she’s been doing all along?
And can Otto keep his jealousy under control long enough for the plan to work?
I had a lot of fun with this one. Curtis isn’t generally my idea of a femme fatale, but she acquits herself well. Cleese’s Archie is a man in a deep rut, married for a very long time to a wife who seems to maybe tolerate him if not outright ignore him. During a scene where Otto and Wanda are having wild sex, the movie intercuts to Archie’s house showing him and his wife getting changed to go to sleep in a separate beds, barely looking at each other. That probably says more about the state of Archie’s life than anything as his wife and daughter likewise tend to ignore him for the first half of the movie. Any excitement would be a plus for the guy even as he fails to realize he’s being scammed for something he doesn’t even know he has.
But then there’s Kline, a prototypical ugly American with a fondness for weapons and Nietzsche and a strong dislike for anyone calling him stupid despite the fact he obviously isn’t very bright. His faux Italian accent when he’s trying to be seductive, his efforts to apologize to someone while holding at gunpoint, the way he nearly crashes every time he tries to drive a car on the wrong side of the road, the guy’s a scene-stealer. Palin likewise has some great moments as the animal-loving Ken is assigned by George to kill a lone witness, an older woman with three small dogs, and Ken’s efforts tend to take out the four-legged witnesses while leaving the woman unscathed.
Despite that, this is more of a sex comedy than a dark one with a fairly low body count, many of which are small dogs. Cleese’s Archie gradually comes to life whole staying his buttoned down self, and the criminals delight as they trip all over each other in an attempt to get the loot over each other, or in Ken’s case, out of revenge when Otto does something Ken finds unspeakable. It all comes down to whether there can be honor or love among thieves, and whether a sad sack lawyer can find even a whiff of happiness.
Grade: A-
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