Withnail & I (HandMade Films, Cineplex Odeon Films, 1987)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 8) beginning at 6:30 I did an old-fashioned Turner Classic Movies marathon that included three features and a short. At first I’d planned to watch Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation of the 1949 film Impact and then the classic rock-festival movie Monterey Pop (the copyright and original release date was 1968 but the movie was filmed in 1967 and at least one of its featured performers, Otis Redding, was dead before it came out), but in TCM’s schedule before it I noticed a movie my husband Charles had been talking up to me for decades. The film was called Withnail & I and it’s set in the Camden neighborhood of London and a vacation cottage in either Scotland or the north of England in 1969. It’s about two struggling and starving would-be actors, Withnail (Richard E. Grant, who went on from debuting in this movie to a career as a British character actor and whose most recent film is The Lesson; its director, Alice Troughton, appeared last night as a guest programmer on TCM and showed this movie as well as Ida Lupino’s film noir masterpiece, The Hitchhiker) and “I” (Paul McGann). Outside documentation on the film, as well as a fleeting insert shot of a telegram “I” receives, gives away his last name as “Marwood,” but the closing credits lists McGann’s character as just “ … & I.” Withnail (whose name is pronounced “Withnall,” by the way) and Marwood are both trying to edge their way into jobs – at one point Withnail angrily turns down a gig as understudy for an actor playing Konstantin in a revival of Anton Chekhov’s The Sea Gull because he thinks understudying is beneath him (c’mon, Withnail, haven’t you ever seen 42nd Street?).

Discouraged by the chaotic state of their flat, including a sinkful of dirty dishes they worry may be inhabited by rats, and their druggie friend Jake (Michael Elphick, whose real-life battle with alcoholism led to his death at 55) who comes over any time he likes, Withnail and “I” bum some money from Withnail’s Gay uncle Montgomery “Monty” Withnail (veteran character actor Richard Griffiths) and take off for Monty’s cabin for a week’s vacation. Only on their way to the cabin (in an old beat-up Jaguar sedan with just one headlight, a car that practically becomes a character in itself) they’re beset by torrential rains, they get lost at night, and once they find the cabin there’s no food there and also – even more importantly – no fuel for the ancient fireplaces and stoves that are the cabin’s only sources of heat. Once it’s morning and the rain lets up, the two look up the local neighbors for food and fuel; widow Mrs. Parkin (Una Brandon-Jones) is as rude as can be, challenging “I”’s assumption that rural people are hospitable and kind, but her son Isaac (Michael Wardle) is more accommodating even though his leg is wrapped in a polythene bag because he suffered an injury when he accidentally ran his tractor over his leg. Their already miserable trip is rendered even worse when Monty Withnail shows up and decides he must seduce “I,” who gets him to back off only by falsely telling him that he and Withnail are a Gay couple. (They’re not, but all too many people in the London-set parts of the movie had accused them of being Gay and threatened to beat them up over it.)

Charles remembered Withnail & I not only because he liked it when it first came out but because, unlike most films of the late 1980’s, it never turned up on VHS tape (though Amazon.com lists a VHS in the British PAL TV format, as well as DVD and Blu-Ray copies; oddly, the DVD’s are hellaciously expensive, running from $65 to over $100, but the Blu-Rays are about $22), and Charles wondered what rights complications kept it off the home video market. Withnail & I (sometimes referred to as Withnail and I) was written and directed by Bruce Robinson, and it was produced by HandMade Films, the studio opened in 1979 by George Harrison (formerly of The Beatles) because no one else had come forward to finance the Monty Python script Life of Brian. George joked that it was the most expensive movie ticket in history – because he desperately wanted to see Monty Python’s Life of Brian he underwrote the film – and he went on to produce a few more quirky British-style comedies, reflecting the admiration The Beatles had always had for the humor of the Peter Sellers-Spike Milligan-Harry Secombe radio show The Goon Squad and its later imitators (including Monty Python). There was at least one other former Beatle besides George Harrison involved in Withnail & I: the closing credits list “Richard Starkey, M.B.E.” (Ringo Starr’s legal name) as “special production consultant.”

Charles said he’d remembered Withnail & I as being talky (which it is) and relatively slow (which it isn’t; though it’s dialogue-driven, Bruce Robinson does a good job of pacing it so it never becomes boring). It’s the kind of movie I ordinarily don’t like because the characters are so relentlessly unsympathetic, but I liked this one because they are so appealingly awful (as are the people around them and the situations they put themselves in, including the great scene in which Withnail and “I” plant themselves in a country tea shop and demand service just as the couple running the place are trying to close for the night) I was entertained and enjoyed the film as camp. And I was gripped by the final scene in which “I” receives a telegram at the cabin saying he’s past at least the first stage of an audition process and he’s got either a part or the promise of one if he can get back to London immediately. Robinson builds up an effective suspense sequence over whether Withnail will be able to drive “I” back in time – he gets stopped by the police and forced to spend the night in jail – and when the two hapless actors finally get back to their flat in Camden they find an eviction notice and Jake and his Black friend, “Presuming Ed” (Eddie Tagoe), squatting there. They also find that they’ve been evicted just as “I” looked about to land a part, or at least the promise of a part, though at the end there’s a final sequence in which Withnail, out in the middle of London, grips a fence and delivers the “What a piece of work is man” soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a stunning fashion that makes us realize the guy can act, and whatever the reasons he hasn’t made it as a star, lack of talent is definitely not one of them.