Look, sometimes you just get a feeling. You can’t explain it! You just know what you have to do. And in this case, it’s watch the 1988 John Cleese-co-authored, Charles Crichton-directed British caper film A Fish Called Wanda.
Is it a seasonal thing? I don’t think so? It’s not strongly linked to any holidays or weather patterns, it’s not particularly cozy or comfy. Maybe it’s because it’s a Friday? Don’t you want to come home after a long week and veg out to a comedy, on the couch? Maybe? Look, I don’t know what to tell you.
Maybe you don’t even want to watch A Fish Called Wanda. You’re like, did this thing even age well? No, it did not! Not really. But you can enjoy it around those parts. The thing is, A Fish Called Wanda is a movie with many, many things going for it. Kevin Kline, for one; he won his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Otto, the Nietzsche-reading, Aristotle-misunderstanding, gun-wielding, armpit-smelling Ugly American who eventually becomes the villain of this movie. John Cleese as the bumbling barrister Archie Leach is another. And Maria Aitken’s as the tough-as-nails English upper-class housewife Wendy Leach is another, particularly when she’s getting the better of both Cleese and Klein.
Except for a few things, the whole thing is a comic masterpiece. It’s about four people (Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Palin, Kevin Kline, and Tom Georgeson) who attempt to pull off a bank heist but wind up devising their own schemes to double-cross the others, nab the goods, and get off scot-free when George, one of their gang members, is arrested, but it turns out that he’s the only one who knows where the loot is hidden, so they have to keep scheming! So, Jamie Lee Curtis’s Wanda decides to try to seduce John Cleese’s Archie, since he’s the lawyer defending George, but this also causes more problems than it solves, especially because her boyfriend Otto is too dull and jealous to look at the big picture of what she’s trying to accomplish. This leads to innumerable obstacles, further complicating the already difficult situation they are in. Not only do they not have the loot, but there has also been a witness to their crime, an elderly woman they’re going to have to silence, in order to pull everything off.
Michael Palin plays their confederate Ken, an animal-loving assassin with a stutter. He’s the one in charge of taking out the elderly witness, and he is, as always, adorable. I will say, though, that the film sets up a lot of laughs based on his speech impediment, and I find this distasteful (for context, I used to stutter for a while as a child, I don’t anymore). I did read, however, that Palin’s own father had a stutter, and he based Ken’s speech pattern’s on his father’s, including how Ken’s stutter grows stronger around people he doesn’t trust or like. Palin has evidently been a longstanding advocate for the speech-language difference community, and serves on the board of the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering, which exists to provide resources and therapy to children and adults with speech differences, difficulties, and disabilities. So, that’s good. It’s still complicated, but it’s good. Take this all for what you will.
Anyway, the film is also the final film directed by Charles Crichton, a legend of British cinema. Working for Ealing Studios in the 1950s, he made The Lavender Hill Mob, one of the loveliest heist/caper movies ever made. Cleese and Crichton, who had been wanting to make a film together since 1969, began writing the script together in 1983. It went through many revisions before making it to its final, filmable version. But it was a collaborative process, ultimately. “We had a week of rehearsals and then a gap of two weeks in which to incorporate any new ideas which had been thrown up and to polish the script,” Crichton said, of the process. “I think this is the ideal way to work, with everybody contributing their special talents and feeling they are part of the film.” That and Kevin Kline famous ad-libbed much of his lines.
Have I convinced you? A Fish Called Wanda, a film which my colleague Dwyer Murphy calls “the madcap heist flick that was your parents’ favorite rental night movie for a good chunk of the late 80s and early 90s,” is the kind of constantly-propulsive, laugh-a-minute mid-budget studio comedy no one makes anymore. This alone should be enough of a reason for you to revisit it, frankly, but if you need another, how about this: you will laugh. You will. You need it, I need it, and most of all, I need it. I’m repeating that for emphasis. It’s not a typo.
