Re: withnail & i

oconnort@nyu.edu
Wed, 07 Jan 1998 16:06:59 -0500 

On Wed, Jan 07, 1998 at 10:10:52AM -0800, Malcolm Lawrence wrote:

> I think it's one of the greatest British films of the last 30 years, if not
> ever. The dialogue is so memorizible, and those Camberwell carrots, what an
> ingenious invention. And Richard E. Grant really turned his performance into
> a veritable archetype. Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a
> day. :)

It's outrageously brilliant, and I'm happy to see that several people
have been able to enjoy it.  For myself, there was an old movie theater
here in NYC that used to show movies in repertory, rather than new
releases, and it eventually closed down, and was taken over by the 
Cineplex Odeon chain, which was the first to raise the ticket price to 
a new high (6 or 7 bucks) in NYC ten or eleven years ago.  But I had 
heard word-of-mouth about this movie, so on the night it was released, 
I went, eager to see the movie but resentful that my favorite old 
theater had been sucked up by this rapacious chain.  

But like a mood-stabilizing drug, "Withnail & I" amazingly changed my
outlook, allowing me to leave the theater happy to have sat through 
such a movie.

> I can't understand why it's out of print in the States already. George
> Harrison's company's problem, that.

Strange -- the author just released a 10th anniversary paperback
of the screenplay, with a new foreword.  (He says, somewhat wearily,
that he thinks it is the last he will write about the movie.)

Also (have I said this before?) that the fellow on whom Withnail 
was based recently died, of throat cancer.  He had followed a steady 
decline and never got anywhere in his acting career.

ObSalinger: I cannot come up with anything remotely connecting this
movie to a discussion of any aspect of Salinger's work, unless we see 
the hapless "I" character (who is given a name in the screenplay, 
which I do not have with me) as resembling Holden Caulfield in his 
search for SOMETHING amid untrustworthy and unfamiliar people.

--tim "I shall never play the Dane" o'connor