‘Withnail and I’ and I
If there’s one thing the world does not need, particularly at this late stage, it’s that another word be written about the film Withnail and I. (Yes, I realise that the on-screen title is actually Withnail & I, but remain convinced that the ampersand was an error inflicted at the titling stage. Posters for the movie always use ‘and’, and even the film’s creator, Bruce Robinson, in his published screenplay, spells it that way.) Oceans of print have been unleashed every time the film has been re-released, and torrents of reminiscence have crowded the bandwidth at every five-year point of anniversary. Robinson’s own introduction to the aforementioned 1995 book version begins ‘This is almost certainly the last time I’ll ever write anything about Withnail and I.’ It’s lucky he put that ‘almost’ in there; he’s never stopped going on about Withnail, most recently in a long-awaited DVD commentary, and why should he? It’s by far the best thing he – and, I’d suggest, everyone concerned – has ever done. (Except, perhaps, George Harrison. He did some pretty handy work with his old band – when he could keep away from the fucking sitar – but Withnail is surely the best movie he made during the Handmade years and, no, I’m not forgetting Life of Brian.) Thousands of previous love letters have been penned to this 1987 masterpiece, so I will, at the very least, try to avoid dropping knowing references to its many, many quotable lines. There will be no references to a certain carrot, or to the amount and quality of wine I wish to see expedited to my table.
So, why bring it up at all?, you ask. Two reasons. Firstly, to draw attention to the local release of what is a ‘world’s best’ version on DVD. (Yes, better than the Criterion edition! Calm down, nerds). And secondly, because I’ve been re-reading With Nails, by Withnail himself, Richard E Grant. I’d forgotten how funny and well-written it is, and how hard it is to stop yourself striding E Grantishly around the house, belting out the more scurrilous passages in the manner of ‘old slab face’ himself. And, as with all accounts of the film’s production, it’s reminded me how close it came to not being made at all.
Robert Sellers’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life lays it out most alarmingly. How Denis O’Brien, Handmade’s too-involved money man, felt the first day’s rushes were a disaster (as Grant details in With Nails, O’Brien felt he should have been ‘throwing his arms around’ more, ‘like Kenneth Williams’), and pretty much gave up on the film then and there. O’Brien wanted more Monty Python movies, not a dark, depressing weekend in the countryside. Robinson had to finance the last week’s shooting himself. Even if you haven’t heard the story, you know how it goes.
Except Withnail & I wasn’t that big a deal when it first came out. I initially saw it on a Friday night, at the Longford, and many in the stalls were nonplussed. To this day, I have one acquaintance, a man whose taste is generally unimpeachable, who can’t get past the first scene and ‘that horrible, dirty kitchen. And him, rubbing that stuff all over his body.’ A lot of the Longford audience felt that way too, uncertain whether to laugh at the dreary circumstances, and mounting desperation, of two men who go on holiday ‘by mistake’. The excellent, but dark, cinematography, which had so worried Denis O’Brien, was more Long Good Friday than Fish Called Wanda and did it ever stop raining? Of course, once Uncle Monty showed up, with his bulging picnic basket and talk of ‘burglary’, all bets were off. This was clearly a rollicking balls-out comedy, but early on, the helpful cues weren’t there.
Even though, when you look at it now, every single line seems to be a classic. Such is the grip of the characters and their, desperate is the only word for it, situation, that even innocuous phrases like Withnail’s ‘Are you the farmer?’ and Danny’s ‘Please, be seated,’ produce explosions of laughter as big as any generated by Ben Stiller’s zipper-damaged scrotum or Borat’s pixellated balls.
I do recall being sucked in from the opening frames, with that brilliantly chosen blast of King Curtis. Then, with the best use ever of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ popping up at the other end, somehow that drizzly, hopeless weekend in the country felt like the best possible place to be, and so it remains in my memory. Even if way more of it than you recall is just ‘I’ trying to evade Monty’s undeviating advances. But on that night in 1987, hardly anyone agreed with me. Yes, it was funny when they were fishing with shotguns, but didn’t you find it all a bit depressing?
But, as the years went by, it became a film that people kept returning to. And it became impossible to see the actors from it in anything else without thinking of who they were in Withnail. It was great when Richard Griffiths showed up as both Dr Meinheimer and his evil twin in Naked Gun 2 and, I guess, to the generations before and after me, he is, respectively, the fat chef from Pie in the Sky and Harry Potter’s horrible fat uncle, but for the ages, he will always be Monty, weeping in butchers’ shops and over letters ‘stained with butter drips from crumpets’. Ralph Brown looks and sounds nothing like his drug-dealer character, but is it possible to watch him in Wayne’s World 2 and not think of Danny; his voice, and his use of ‘medicine’ as a verb? E Grant – ‘Egrers’, as I call him – has been in loads of things, but has he ever been as right as he was in this, his first film? (Actually, he had previously appeared in an obscure, but rather good, British telemovie, which I had the honour of adding to the Internet Movie Database a few years back. I transcribed the credits to Honest Decent & True from an ancient VHS and sent them in, suspect ampersand and all). I love Withnail’s volcanic furies, which he directs at anyone and anything, including, when he refuses an understudy job, the character he was to have played (‘Constantine? That little pimp!’).
As for ‘I’, Paul McGann, I know one woman who has been so in love with him since Withnail that she is offering upwards of a hundred bucks for a DVD of Paper Mask!
And when Michael Elphick died, the clips were all from EastEnders and The Elephant Man, but in my head I ran the shot of him as the poacher in Withnail, casually stunning the fish on the bar of the ‘Crow and Cunt’, as it’s referred to in the screenplay.
I see that I’ve already started listing lines and moments from the movie, like every other mad fan. It’s that kind of film. Or rather, it eventually became that kind of film. (Was there anything more satisfying than seeing that Trainspotting-style tribute poster for the ten year re-release?) And, despite its faint aroma of mustiness, some of the young people have started to latch onto it. When I was about to start working with Ed Kavalee on radio’s Get This, I asked him who would be his ultimate ‘co-host’ for our proposed format. To my surprise, he immediately said ‘Richard E Grant’ and revealed that Withnail and I was his favourite film of all time. I thought he was taking the piss, until he started doing the bit where Monty says he knows that ‘I’ is a ‘toilet trader’.
What, then, were the chances, when the very first big name guest we were offered turned out to be Richard E Grant? I’m telling you, you never saw three grown men fawn so pathetically over another one. Egrers was, as advertised, an outrageously charming man, seemingly younger then than when he’d shot the movie, twenty years earlier, and only too happy to tackle our predictable questions. There weren’t any he hadn’t heard before. How could there be?
I say three grown men, because, of course, Richard Marsland was there. I recall Ed and me, immodestly brandishing our first editions of With Nails and berating Richard for bringing in only a copy of Bruce Robinson’s screenplay to be signed. ‘It was all I had,’ he protested. But two days later, on my birthday, the remarkable Mr Marsland presented me with a brand-new copy of the Criterion edition of the film, which he’d secretly gotten E Grant to autograph. And here it sits, on my desk, a tale of two Richards.
And this is why I can’t bring myself to buy that beautiful new two-disc DVD with its newly struck 16:9 transfer. But don’t let me stop you from snapping one up. For years I’ve been going against the grain, deliberately not recommending the film; rather that, than have someone see it for the first time in the disgraceful 3:4 DVD version that has been stinking up the discount bins for as long as I can remember. Now, at last, it can be seen by all, looking its best.
And if you haven’t seen Withnail & I (all right, I’ll give you your ampersand), chances are you’ll get to the end of it and still be wondering what all the fuss is about. But give it time because, if I may be forgiven one final quote, ‘the fucker’s alive’.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Click here to see an extended version of his video shops report from ‘The 7PM Project’.
Back
