Peter’s Friends **** (1992, Hugh Laurie, Imelda Staunton, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Kenneth Branagh) – Classic Movie Review 10,576

‘There are some friends you know you will have for the rest of your life. You’re welded together by love, trust, respect or loss… or in our case, simple embarrassment.’

The 1992 British film Peter’s Friends is a witty comedy drama from producer-director Kenneth Branagh, who casts his own friends as a group of Footlights-style Cambridge University graduates, called up ten years later to spend the New Year weekend with Peter Morton (Stephen Fry) at the large English countryside ancestral home he has just inherited following the death of his father.

Branagh plays a writer called Andrew Benson, who has gone to the US to live with health-freak TV star Carol Benson (Rita Rudner, who also co-writes with her husband Martin Bergman), and there Roger Charleston (Hugh Laurie) and Mary Charleston (Imelda Staunton) are TV jingle writers who are falling apart after the death of one of their twins, as well as Sarah Johnson (Alphonsia Emmanuel) who is bonking his newly married lover Brian (Tony Slattery), and housekeeper Vera (Phyllida Law, Thompson’s real-life mother).

There is an abundance of splendid, inventive material here for laughs and quite a few tears too. It manages sudden mood changes with great ease and all the performers give terrific turns. Fry seems to dominate the film, but then he is the biggest personality, and he does get the whole of the heart-tugging finale to himself.

Peter’s Friends is a good film, funny, warm-hearted, well meaning, kind and generous. See it with a friend.

Also in the cast are Richard Briers, Rita Rudner, Alex Lowe, Edward Jewesbury, Ann Davies, Chris Pickles and Nicola Wright.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,576

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