A Fish Called Wanda ***** (1988, John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline) – Classic Movie Review 350

Crooks get more than they bargain for when they try to pull a London diamond heist since only the crime’s mastermind knows where the jewels are – and he’s been locked away by the cops. The gangsters’ moll (Jamie Lee Curtis) plots to nab all the swag by seducing the mastermind’s defence attorney, Archie Leach (John Cleese).

Star-writer Cleese sets about to try to create a worldwide hit for himself and this does the trick big time. The marvellous 1988 comedy gem A Fish Called Wanda is a hilarious fusion of old-time cosy fun and Eighties cynicism, of English eccentricity and American pizzazz. It is British humour packaged to appeal to an American audience, but this self-appointed task has only served to sharpen and hone Cleese’s wit and invention.

Cleese as the barrister, Curtis as a sexy American con-woman (she is Wanda Gershwitz but probably not a fish, more of a dish), Michael Palin as Ken Pile, a pathological stutterer who kills dogs and gets chips rammed up his nose, and best supporting actor Oscar-winning Kevin Kline as an arms dealer called Otto all give brilliant, uproarious comedy performances. They’re perfectly judged, perfectly timed, perfectly pitched performances of a witty script, and that adds up to funny.

Under the guidance of Cleese, the former Ealing studios film director Michael Crichton (The Lavender Hill Mob) performs the trick of a lifetime – staging a hit comeback as director at 78. That’s even more astonishing when you think that he had not directed a theatrical movie for 23 years (He Who Rides a Tiger in 1965). Sadly, though, it proved his last film. He lived till 1999 when he was 89.

He is also credited as co-writer of the story with Cleese. It goes something like this. Wanda is an obsessive lover of diamonds and she comes to England with her boyfriend Otto to plot the robbery of a collection of them with George Thomason (Tom Georgeson) and Ken. Greedy Wanda and Otto want sole grabs on the gems they have now stolen and inform the police about George, but he has hidden them in a secret place. To find out exactly where they are, Wanda needs to get up close and personal to George’s lawyer – Archie Leach.

Among the film’s more dubious delights: Cleese gets naked, Kline gets squashed by a steamroller and eats fish (though made of jello), Palin gets laughs out of stuttering and getting chips up his nose, choirboys sing a Latin hymn when the dog dies (‘Have mercy, Lord, the dog is dead’) and there is a key hidden in a fish tank. Despite all this, or because of it, A Fish Called Wanda is pretty darned Wandaful!

Bizarrely, the film’s main props, angel fish, proved hard to come by in 1988 when a plague struck down Britain’s angel fish population. The props men scoured the country and found a remaining half-dozen in a remote part of Scotland. The star quartet reassembled for a follow-up, Fierce Creatures, in 1997. Archie Leach was of course the real name of Cary Grant. Cleese chose it because he was born 20 miles away from where Grant was born in Bristol.

Cynthia Cleese, John Cleese’s and Connie Booth’s daughter, plays Leach’s daughter Portia.

Palin, whose father stuttered, founded the London Centre for Stammering Children after a group of stutterers confronted him over Ken’s handicap in the film.

And, I’m afraid that you really can die laughing. In 1989, when Wanda was shown in the cinemas in Denmark, Ole Bentzen, a Danish audiologist, literally laughed himself to death during the scene where Ken gets the chips stuffed up his nose.

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© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 350

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