Magnificent Anarchy
Withnail & I

2,315 words

One of the saddest things about the tragedy that England has become is the loss of its comedy. Traditionally seen as a nation of sober, sensible yeomanry with a philosophical tradition of bullish empiricism and a stiff upper lip to boot, the English were the epitome of gravitas. And yet this small, rainy, rather gloomy country has produced supreme comedy not just for domestic consumption, but able to travel abroad carrying the universally accepted currency of humor.

Monty Python, Peter Sellers, Peter Cook (and Dudley Moore), Rowan Atkinson as Blackadder and Mr. Bean (and many others), even the tacky but quintessentially English Carry On movies; all these and more have found warm welcomes from audiences across Europe and the Commonwealth, even making it to the New World. I was amazed when I first started meeting Americans here in Central America who knew – and loved – the ribald 1970s English comedian Benny Hill.

But what is a quintessential English film comedy? The famous Ealing comedies of the post-war period are a gauge. The Lavender Hill Mob, The Ladykillers, Kind Hearts and Coronets; these were all superbly English both in their settings and their humor. They are low-key and modest in design. No belly-laughs, just movies that could be relied on to raise the constant chuckle the English cleave to in times of depression and despair. So, where could we find an English comedy which serves as a show-reel for British humor taken as a whole? I would suggest 1987’s low-budget classic, Withnail & I.

Directed by Bruce Robinson and starring young actors Richard E. Grant as Withnail, Paul McGann as “I”, and the corpulent Richard Griffiths as Withnail’s Uncle Monty, the film tells a tale of two struggling actors in London’s Camden Town at the end of the 1960s. They decide to “rejuvenate” with a weekend in a cottage in Wales, owned by Monty.

Robinson based the script on his own experience of student poverty, which is why the depiction of domestic squalor, cold, and disorder in the two thespians’ Camden apartment is so realistic. Withnail covers his entire body in deep heat rub against the cold, “I” wears his omnipresent black leather coat even indoors, and the washing-up becomes a scene from a horror film as Withnail gingerly introduces a rubber-gloved hand into a sink full of putrid and rotting dishware. “I” (McGann’s character is never named, although he has become known to fans as Marwood” as this was the name in the published screenplay) asks in horror what is in there. Withnail replies in fear, “Matter. It’s nicotine and sinew-based”.

They wait it out until noon and pub opening time. These were the days when English pub opening hours were severely limited. (When I was last there you could get a drink at eight in the morning, should you so desire). They hatch their plan to retire to Monty’s cottage in Wales before an altercation with one of the huge and unpredictably violent Irishmen who actually were a regular feature in the London of the 1970s convinces them to get out while the getting is good.

This is a movie of short and, for fans, unforgettable lines, but it is held together by a voiceover diary kept by “I”. An early scene in a café (which the English called “caffs” and were very far removed from what the word “café” usually conjures up) is eerily reminiscent of the grotesque carnival today’s England has become. After watching a woman straight out of a Breughel painting munch into a fried-egg sandwich which spews its innards over the table, he turns in horror to see the headline of a tabloid newspaper: “I had to become a woman!” ln that era, sex changes were as rare as comets, whereas now in England that kind of proclamation might well feature in your child’s teacher’s introductory chat to the class.

Next, it’s into the pair’s artfully beaten-up Jaguar for a drive to Wales, an episode which is the reverse of England’s poetic tradition of pastoral, in which the countryside makes all things well after urban strife. For the hapless actors, things just get worse. The Welsh countryside is – or at least was, last time I checked – beautiful and serene, but the two townies can’t fathom its protocols. Buying a chicken from a local farmer, they are alarmed by the delivery of a live fowl rather than a cling-wrapped carcass. “Let’s kill it”, says “I”, “before it tries to make friends with us”.

The antics of the two foppish London actors in the bucolic setting of the hills and valleys of Wales provide many of the movie’s priceless lines. I think I know them all, but I won’t act like the pub bore, because as words on a page they don’t have the absurdist impact the movie brings to life. The scenes in Wales exemplify why, during an interview, Robinson called the film “magnificent anarchy”.

There is no love interest in the film, not as such, except for the fact that the reason Monty joins the boys on their bucolic weekend turns out to be that he is gay – if you hadn’t grasped that for yourself already – and it transpires that Withnail had told his uncle that “I” himself was gay, a “toilet trader”, as unfortunate homosexuals were branded at the time. Homosexuality had only been legalized in Britain four years before the film is set. “I intend to have you, boy”, a priapic Monty tells a cornered “I”, “even if it’s burglary!”

In these times of “fat-shaming” – also known as noticing that someone is grossly overweight and being rebuked for mentioning it – Richard Griffiths would be a protected species had he not passed away in 2013. He really was a very fat man indeed, although a consummate actor within these limitations. I saw him play Galileo in London in Brecht’s play about the astronomer, and he was commanding for sound thespian reasons rather than just his girth. His performance as Uncle Monty is a brilliantly executed mix of salaciousness and alcoholism. He drinks the finest wines and sherries, speaks Latin, and drives a beautiful old Rolls-Royce (which had to be specially adapted to accommodate Griffiths’ capacious frame).

Withnail’s betrayal is the last straw for the young actor, and a telegram arrives informing him that he has landed a part in a stage production of the famous English World War I play, Journey’s End. Monty has fled in shame after his failed seduction, the pair drive back to London, or rather “I” does before stopping for a snooze and waking to find Withnail – who can’t drive – at the wheel, swigging from a bottle of scotch and weaving between cars in the wrecked and ultra-conspicuous Jag. “I” begs Withnail to stop, but the drunk driver treats it like a video game as he passes cars in various lanes. “Here comes another fucker”, he chortles, swigging heartily from his bottle of scotch. I’ve seen this film a couple of dozen times and this scene always reminds me of the Tom Waits line:

I got my lips around a bottle,
I got my foot on the throttle.

Speaking of music, the whole crazed car sequence is accompanied by rare incidental music – I don’t imagine there is a soundtrack album to this movie – and in this case it is that weird, whacked-out guitar solo in Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile. There is a constant and subtle air of the surreal about Withnail & I.

After Withnail’s inevitable arrest, the pair arrive back in Camden to find their flat has been squatted by the unspeakable Danny and his enormous friend. Danny is a drug fiend, and the performance by unknown Ralph Brown has become the stuff of English film legend. The rolling of the famous “Camberwell Carrot”, a joint so large it requires 12 cigarette papers, is accompanied by Danny’s helpful tale of its provenance: “It’s called a Camberwell carrot because I was in Camberwell when I invented it, and it resembles a carrot”.

That quote makes a good point about this movie. Reading it back as though I didn’t know the film, it’s just not very funny on the page. It doesn’t leap out and grab you like reading a Woody Allen script does. Robinson claims the film was tightly scripted and it was all shot on book, with almost no improvisation. It is the performances that give this film life, and as comic acting, the whole cast prove that you don’t need sophisticated dialogue to make a funny yet clever movie.

The final scene of this wistful, squalid, and terribly English comedy is bitingly sad, and is taken from one of the most famous tragedies ever written, the What a piece of work is a man! soliloquy from Hamlet. A lot of us have strolled over to Regent’s Park at dusk, suitably drunk, to recreate the abandoned Withnail speech to the wolves. One used, in the 1980s, to be able to see the wolf park, and I spent many an evening there with friends on a convenient bench, watching the wolves. They stopped all that. People were getting something for nothing, seeing the wolves without having to pay to enter the zoo.

Withnail & I could not be made in the England of today. Women appear onscreen for around two minutes of the movie, are all old crones, and get about half-a-dozen lines between them. The only black in the film gets no lines at all, except for a deep mantra as he spins a globe. He is called Prezumin’ Ed, and is a friend of Danny’s. The film also refers to blacks as “spades”, an Americanism that travelled across the herring-pond to the UK in the 60s to describe blacks, presumably referring to the black suit in the standard deck of cards. I doubt you could even use the phrase “let’s call a spade a spade” anymore in England without at least a Non-Crime Hate Incident being recorded against your name. If you happen to be white, that is.

The musical score is sparse, as noted. The movie opens with a lush and gorgeous jazz version of Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale, as “I” surveys a new day of poverty and failure, and apart from that there is a sort of calliope music-box piece which serves as incidental music, along with two Hendrix songs – All Along the Watchtower and Voodoo Chile – which accompany the drunk-drive in the knackered old Jag from and back to London.

It’s a very boozy film. There was the “Withnail & I drinking game”, for which you needed to stock up on the beverages consumed during the film, and drink them in time with the characters, although a word of advice before you gamers start swigging. You probably won’t be able to afford some of the finer wines in Monty’s cellar – unless you have the funds necessary for a case of Château Margot – and I would avoid imbibing the lighter fluid Withnail slugs when he realizes the pair have run out of wine. Drinking with a Glaswegian friend and fellow Withnail fan in Covent Garden one afternoon, I went to the bathroom only to return to find my pal had ordered the first round of drinks Withnail requests in the movie; “Two large gins, two pints of cider. Ice in the cider”. We dispatched these, with the accompanying dialogue.

But despite all the booze in the movie, and Grant looking more wasted than anyone I have ever seen on or off-screen, Grant was a teetotaler. To give the actor a taste, as it were, of the drinking life, Robinson got him completely drunk and, after the resultant mess was cleared up, Grant used his experience to great effect. Robinson said of the first and last drinking spree Grant ever went on, and with impeccable reasoning, “If you have never been drunk, you don’t know what it’s like to be drunk.” Grant learned fast.

A good friend of mine in England – and fellow actor at the time – loved Withnail & I so much he wrote to Robinson asking permission to produce a stage version. The director politely refused the request, but his typewritten reply was doubly charming in that he wrote it in the “voice” of Withnail. My friend hung it on his bathroom wall so that you could read it while you were taking a pee. If you were a man, that is, or a particularly masculine woman. It is not a film that could ever be remade to any effect, and Robinson was always set against a sequel, although he was offered the opportunity to make one once the film picked up speed from its initial poor box-office showing to cult status.

As befits an English classic, the film owes its existence to The Beatles, rounding off a thoroughly English production. Handmade Films, the production responsible for several low-budget English comedies, was part-owned by George Harrison, who put up the money for Withnail & I, and Ringo Starr got a consultancy credit for, apparently, getting drunk with director Robinson. This is entirely consistent with Harrison’s reputation as the nicest human being in the Fab Four. Singer Harry Nilsson, who vied with the band’s producer George Martin for the title of the “fifth Beatle”, was a great friend of Harrison’s, and singled him out as the one caring personality in England’s most successful band.

There isn’t a great deal to smile about in modern England, but at least it still has a back-catalogue of comedy films which at least recall the days in the not-too-distant past when it was a warm and funny place to live in. I am not sure how Withnail & I would translate into languages other than English and retain its charm and comic edge, but I suppose this is a hazard faced by every sub-titled or dubbed movie. As a film representative of a bygone age of English cinematic humor, Withnail & I is unmissable.