A Fish Called Wanda

Charles Crichton (and uncredited John Cleese), 1988 (8.5*)
A sparkling comedic cast help push this heist satire over the top into rarified waters. There aren’t many crime comedies worth watching more than once, this is one of them.

John Cleese (of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers fame) plays a judge who falls for the wiles of American con-artist Jamie Lee Curtis, who seduces him to order help pull a con on some British partners in crime (without Cleese’s knowledge). Her supposed brother, but partner in crime, is brilliantly played to mucho laughs by an Oscar®-winning Kevin Kline. He is really her dumb boyfriend, whose recurring line is “Don’t call me stupid!”, because he is the proverbial knot-on-a-log thick.

They enlist the aid of inside man Ken, played by another former Python member Michael Palin, with a wonderful stutter (“Ka-ka-ka-Ken!”), who’s a doting owner of an overloved pet fish named Wanda, hence the title. Yes, there's often offensive humor in this, but it's still sedate compared to Python, no gushing arteries or chunk hurling here.

Some of the best stuff to come from the Python group, likely because the Jones-Gilliam silliness is tempered by the veteran direction of master British director Charles Crichton, who directed the classic The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) bw.

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The Lavender Hill Mob

Charles Crichton, 1951, bw (8.5*)
This is one of a line of wonderful Ealing Studios British comedies in classic b&w, the best of which starred Alec Guinness, such as the futuristic spoof of capitalism, The Man in the White Suit, in which a scientist invents an indestructible cloth; and The Ladykillers, remade with Tom Hanks, in which a scholarly gang of bank robbers rents a room in a boarding house from which to tunnel into a bank. Also, my favorite, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), a hilarious spoof of tontines in which one member becomes a serial killer in order to hasten his collecting the booty.

In The Lavender Hill Mob, Guinness heads a small group of criminals who plot to steal a truckload of gold buillion (he works on the shipments, so he's the inside man), then smuggle it in a very unique way, which of course, cannot be foolproof, this being a crime comedy.
The cast is one of those typically talented veteran British casts, headed by Stanley Holloway, a later Oscar®-winner for My Fair Lady; Guinness would later win for actor in The Bridge On the River Kwai. The only time they still make comedies like these is when they remake one of these. These each had something unique for their time and became archetypal spoof of whatever they tackled. The general theme with most of these is 'greedy people, even if well off, will even resort to murder to gain even more wealth, and they aren't always the sharpest tacks in the toolbox either'.

If you like the crime spoof comedies, be sure to check out the late Italian master Mario Monicelli's hilarious take on heist films Big Deal on Madonna St (1959) Italy, bw with a gang that severely lacked a mastermind, or really any type of mind. Monicelli died last year at 95, after working on over 100 films as either director or writer.

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