November 16, 2010 (XXI:12) Charles Crichton, A FISH CALLED WANDA (1988, 108 min)

Directed by Charles Crichton and John Cleese (uncredited) Story by John Cleese and Charles Crichton Produced by Michael Shamberg Original Music by John Du Prez Cinematography by Alan Hume Film Editing by John Jympson John Cleese...Archie Leach Jamie Lee Curtis...Wanda Gershwitz Kevin Kline...Otto Michael Palin...Ken Pile Maria Aitken...Wendy Tom Georgeson...Georges Thomason Patricia Hayes...Mrs. Coady Geoffrey Palmer...Judge Cynthia Cleese...Portia CHARLES CRICHTON (6 August 1910, Wallasey, Cheshire, England – 14 September 1999, South Kensington, London, England) directed 47 films and shows, the last of which was A Fish Called Wanda 1988. Some of the others were More Bloody Meetings 1984, “Perishing Solicitors” 1983, “Cosmic Princess” 1982, "Dick Turpin" 1979-1982, "Smuggler" 1981, "Return of the Saint" 1978-1979, "The Professionals" 1978, "Space: 1999" 1975-1976, "The Adventures of Black Beauty" 1972-1974, "The Avengers" 1965-1969, "Secret Agent" 1964, The Battle of the Sexes 1959, Law and Disorder 1958, The Love Lottery 1954, The Lavender Hill Mob 1951, Hue and Cry 1947, Dead of Night 1945, and For Those in Peril 1944. JOHN DU PREZ (14 December 1946, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England) composed scores for 29 films and programs, some of which were Not the Messiah: He's a Very Naughty Boy 2010, Fascination 2004, "Captain Star" 1997, The Wind in the Willows 1996, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze 1991, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1990, A Fish Called Wanda 1988, A Chorus of Disapproval 1988, “Love with the Perfect Stranger” 1986, A Private Function 1984, Oxford Blues 1984, Bullshot Crummond 1983, The Crimson Permanent Assurance 1983 , The Meaning of Life 1983, and The Pantomime Dame 1982. ALAN HUME (16 October 1924, London, England – 13 July 2010, Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, England) was cinematographer for 99 films and shows, including "Tales from the

Crypt" 1996, Just Like a Woman 1992, Eve of Destruction 1991, A Fish Called Wanda 1988, Hearts of Fire 1987, “Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story” 1987, “John and Yoko: A Love Story” 1985, Runaway Train 1985, Supergirl 1984, Octopussy 1983, Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi 1983, Eye of the Needle 1981, For Your Eyes Only 1981, Caveman 1981, Carry on Emmannuelle 1978, The Legacy 1978, Gulliver's Travels 1977, The Land That Time Forgot 1975, Carry on Girls 1973, Carry on Abroad 1972, Zeppelin 1971, "The Avengers" 1965-1968, Carry on Doctor 1967, Carry on in the Legion 1967, Carry on Pimpernel 1966, Carry on Screaming! 1966, Carry on Cowboy 1966, Carry on Spying 1964, Carry on Jack 1963, Carry on Regardless 1961, and Beware of Children 1960. JOHN CLEESE (27 October 1939, Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset, England), one of the Monty Pythons, wrote 56 films and shows, some of which were “The Art of Football from A to Z” 2006, “Wine for the Confused” 2004, Monty Python Live 2001, Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail 1996, A Fish Called Wanda 1988, The Meaning of Life 1983, "Fawlty Towers" 1975-1979, Life of Brian 1979, The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It 1977, "The Two Ronnies" 1971-1976, Monty Python and the Holy Grail 1975, "Monty Python's Flying Circus" 1969-1974, And Now for Something Completely Different 1971, "Doctor at

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Large" 1971, “How to Irritate People” 1968, "At Last the 1948 Show" 1967, and "That Was the Week That Was" 1962-1963. He has acted in 111 films and series, some of which are Spud 2010, The Pink Panther 2 2009, The Day the Earth Stood Still 2008, Around the World in 80 Days 2004, Shrek 2 2004, "Will & Grace" 2003-2004, Time Troopers 2004, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 2002, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone 2001, "3rd Rock from the Sun" 1998-2001, The Out-of-Towners 1999, The Wind in the Willows 1996, Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail 1996, Frankenstein 1994, Splitting Heirs 1993, An American Tail: Fievel Goes West 1991, Erik the Viking 1989, A Fish Called Wanda 1988, Silverado 1985, Yellowbeard 1983, The Meaning of Life 1983, Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl 1982, Time Bandits 1981, The Great Muppet Caper 1981, "Fawlty Towers" 1975-1979, Life of Brian 1979, The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It 1977, Monty Python and the Holy Grail 1975, "Monty Python's Flying Circus" 1969-1973, And Now for Something Completely Different 1971, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer 1970, The Magic Christian 1969, The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom 1968, Interlude 1968, and "The Avengers" 1968. JAMIE LEE CURTIS (22 November 1958, Los Angeles, California, USA) has acted in 61 films and shows, the most recent of which is You Again 2010. Some of the others are Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2008, The Tuttles: Madcap Misadventures 2007, Christmas with the Kranks 2004, Halloween: Resurrection 2002, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer & the Island of Misfit Toys 2001, The Tailor of Panama 2001, Drowning Mona 2000, Virus 1999, House Arrest 1996, True Lies 1994, Forever Young 1992, "Anything But Love" 1989-1992, Blue Steel 1989, A Fish Called Wanda 1988, Amazing Grace and Chuck 1987, A Man in Love / Un homme amoureux 1987, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension 1984, Trading Places 1983, Love Letters 1983, Halloween III: Season of the Witch 1982, Prom Night 1980, The Fog 1980, Halloween 1978, "Operation Petticoat” 1977-1978, "Columbo" 1977, and "Quincy M.E." 1977. KEVIN KLINE (24 October 1947, St. Louis, Missouri, USA) has acted in 49 films and shows, some of which are No Strings 2011, The Conspirator 2010, The Extra Man 2010, Definitely, Maybe 2008, As You Like It 2006, A Prairie Home Companion 2006, The Pink Panther 2006, Wild Wild West 1999, A Midsummer Night's Dream 1999, The Ice Storm 1997, French Kiss 1995, Dave 1993, Chaplin 1992, Grand Canyon 1991, Soapdish 1991, The January Man 1989, A Fish Called Wanda 1988, Cry Freedom 1987, Violets Are Blue... 1986, Silverado 1985, The Big Chill 1983, The Pirates of Penzance 1983, Sophie's Choice 1982, and “The Time of Your Life” 1976. He won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in A Fish Called Wanda. MICHAEL PALIN (5 May 1943, Ranmoor, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England ), was also a Python. He wrote all or part of 51 films and shows, some of which are “Around the World in 20 Years” 2008, Education Tips No. 41: Choosing a Really Expensive School 2003, The Best of the Two Ronnies: Volume 2 2003, The Best of the Two Ronnies 2002, Monty Python Live 2001, Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail 1996, The Meaning of Life 1983, The Missionary 1982 , Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl 1982, Time Bandits 1981, The Box 1981, "Ripping Yarns" 1976-1979, Life of Brian 1979, "The Two Ronnies" 1971-1976, Monty Python and the Holy Grail 1975, "Monty Python's Flying Circus" 1969-1974,

“Secrets” 1973, And Now for Something Completely Different 1971, "Do Not Adjust Your Set" 1967-1969, "A Series of Bird's" 1967, "The Late Show" 1966, and "The Frost Report" 1966. He has acted in 49 films and shows, including Not the Messiah: He's a Very Naughty Boy 2010, “Robbie the Reindeer in Close Encounters of the Herd Kind” 2007, "Saturday Night Live" 1980-1997, The Wind in the Willows 1996, Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail 1996 , “Tracey Ullman: A Class Act” 1992, American Friends 1991, A Fish Called Wanda 1988, Brazil 1985, The Dress 1984, “Red Monarch” 1983, The Meaning of Life 1983, The Missionary 1982, Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl 1982, Time Bandits 1981, The Box 1981, "Ripping Yarns" 1976-1979, Life of Brian 1979, Jabberwocky 1977, “Red Dress” 1977, “Pleasure at Her Majesty's” 1976, “Three Men in a Boat” 1975, Monty Python and the Holy Grail 1975, "Monty Python's Flying Circus" 1969-1974, And Now for Something Completely Different 1971, “Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus” 1971, "Do Not Adjust Your Set" 1967-1969, “How to Irritate People” 1968, "Twice a Fortnight" 1967, and "A Series of Bird's" 1967.

“Charles Crichton,” From World Film Directors Vol. I. Ed. John Wakeman. The H. W. Wilson Co., NY, 1987. Entry by Roy Sherwood. British director, producer, and editor, was born in Wallasey, Cheshire. On leaving Oundle School he tried his hand at gold prospecting in Canada but at the insistence of his parents returned home and completed his education, studying history at New College, Oxford University. It was while he was at Oxford that he became seriously interested in the cinema. When Leontine Sagan and Zoltan Corda visited the university to film sequences for their Men of Tomorrow, he approached them for a job, and in 1931 he joined London Film Productions as an assistant in the cutting rooms. By 1935 he had progressed to film editor, in which capacity he worked on such well-known London Film Productions movies as Sanders of the River, Things to Come, Elephant Boy, Prison Without Bars, and The Thief of Baghdad.

In 1940 Crichton moved to Michael Balcon’s Easling Studios as an editor and the following year he directed his first film, a documentary short called Young Veterans, produced by Alberto Cavalcanti. According to an Ealing press release, “his promotion to the sphere of directing was helped by one thing and one thing only. He became one of the best editors in the British film industry.” Crichton’s first feature film was For Those in Peril (1944), a drama about the wartime Air-Sea Rescue service starring David Farrar and Ralph Michael. There is a strong documentary element in this “absolutely orthodox” movie, and there was a good deal of praise

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for the opening montage of boats, gulls, and roofscapes in the early morning, before the patrols set out. Painted Boats (1945), about the life of English canal workers, is even closer to documentary, and has a voice-over commentary by Louis MacNeice. In the same year Crichton directed one of the five episodes comprising Dead of Night, an anthology of ghost stories involving Ealing Studios’ finest talents. It is significant that Crichton was assigned to direct a humorous piece—a “Golfing Story” featuring Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne.

Although during his long sojourn at Ealing Crichton’s work was to be divided fairly equally between light comedy and drama, his greatest successes were in the former mode. And it was a comedy that in 1947 established Crichton as a director of exceptional promise. Hue and Cry, the first of the postwar cycle of Ealing comedies, was written by T.E.B. Clarke and involves the detection and apprehension, by a gang of cockney kids, of fur thieves who send coded messages to one another through a boys’ magazine. The film is essentially an amiable fantasy but, as Crichton explained, “we had to emphasize the absurdity of our story through the realism with which we stated it, to enrich our fantasy by the conviction of its telling.”

Hue and Cry demonstrates Crichton’s talent for extracting first-rate performances from actors, especially child actors like Harry Fowler, who plays the fifteen-year-old sleuth Joe. Alstair Sim contributes a marvelously baroque and eccentric performance as a writer of boys’ stories, and the cast also includes such Ealing stalwarts as Jack Warner , Valerie White, and Jack Lambert. Crichton showed a natural talent for location work, especially in the climactic chase in which three hundred boys scramble over the blitzed ruins of London in hot pursuit of the villains.

“The director, Charles Crichton, has given proof of great talent,” wrote one reviewer, and another in the London Times thought that the director had given his simple story “all the painstaking and lively detail that a good adventure story should have. Scene after scene is brilliantly composed, with the dialogue always giving bite to what is merely conventional in the situation.” Richard Winnington welcomed the film as “one of the most refreshing, blood-tingling and disarming pictures of its kind that the British, or in fact any filmmakers, have produced so far—Emil and the Detectives and Nous Les Gosses not excepted.” It was an instant hit, though it was to be some time before the Ealing team realized that they had invented a new comedy genre.

Crichton followed Hue and Cry with Against the Wind and Another Shore, both released in 1948. The former stars Robert Beatty, Jack Warner , and Simone Signoret in a wartime drama about Allied saboteurs in occupied Belgium. Beatty plays the lead in Another Shore also, somewhat miscast as an Irishman who dreams of adventure in the South Seas but is sidetracked into marriage (to Moira Lister) and a steady job. Neither film made much impact, not did Train of Events (1949), which in separate

episodes (directed by Sidney Cole, Basil Dearden, and Crichton) explores the lives of four victims of a train crash. Dance Hall (1950) also tells several stories but this times weaves them into a single narrative about London factory girls, their soul-destroying jobs, and their pursuit of something more exciting at the local “Palais de Danse.” It is a solid piece of work, interesting as a more or less serious study of working-class life (still rare in British cinema) and with an excellent cast including, among others, Natasha Parry, Jane Hylton, Diana Dors, Petula Clark, Donald Houston, Kat Kendall, and Harry Fowler.

In his study of Ealing studios, Charles Barr points out that the essential element in an Ealing comedy is fantasy. “Given the ‘fantasy’ premise, the story proceeds in a naturalistic style, in real or at least realistic settings…within this framework, Ealing can play out at leisure the daydream of a benevolent community and can partly evade, partly confront in a more manageable form, those awkward ‘postwar’ issues, social and personal, with which it has hitherto been somewhat glumly trying to deal.” Barr locates “the mainstream of Ealing production after the war” in the work of the scriptwriter T.E.B. Clarke and of the directors Basil Dearden and Charles Crichton. The latter’s second film with Clarke was The

Lavender Hill Mob (1951), in which a meek Bank of England clerk sets out to steal a million pounds in gold bullion from his employers by casting it into souvenir models of the Eiffel Tower which can then be “exported” out of the country. Alec Guinness gives a brilliantly observed performance as the genteel criminal, while the excellent camerawork is by Crichton’s usual cinematographer, Douglas Slocombe.

The film was received as warmly as Hue and Cry had been four years earlier and according to the Times critic

showed the same “great skill in the handling of the crowd scenes and in the exploitation of character. …There is also a great fertility of invention in minor details and in the incidents of the chase which such a film as this demands and which is handled by Mr. Crichton with all the skill he has shown is his earlier films.” The traveling matte was used to great effect in the “riotous, rapid sequences” in which Guinness and his accomplice (Stanley Holloway) chase down the Eiffel Tower. The Lavender Hill Mob won an Oscar for the best screenplay of 1951, and the best scenario award at the Venice Film Festival.

Hunted (1952), in which a runaway boy joins forces with a fugitive murderer (Dirk Bogard) was made for GFD/Independent Artists and was followed by another Crichton-Clarke comedy, The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953). This, Ealing’s first comedy in Technicolor, starred Stanley Holloway, George Relph, Naunton Wayne, John Gregson, and Hugh Griffith in a story about the inhabitants of a small country town and their campaign to save a railroad branch line from closure through the machinations of an evil bus company and heartless bureaucrats. It is an archetypal Ealing comedy theme, but there were signs that the genre was losing its freshness and declining into self-conscious quaintness and

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a sentimental and conservative celebration of tradition for its own sake. As Charles Barr points out, the sense of community involvement, so important in the earlier Ealing comedies like Hue and Cry and Passport to Pimlico, is here entirely spurious: “There is no grasp of a living community in the film, or of the relevance of the train to people’s daily needs. It’ the hobby of a few eccentric amateurs.” And there were other complaints. One critic wrote that “somebody must give back to director Charles Crichton that sense of comic timing which Hue and Cry and The Lavender Hill Mob showed him to possess….

Mr. Crichton has allowed too many incidents to continue on the screen longer than we are quite prepared to laugh at them.” And C.A. Lejeune agreed that the movie “might have done with crisper cutting and “more direct direction.”

The Love Lottery (1954), a feeble comedy starring David Niven as a film star offered as a prize in a lottery, was followed the same year by the most successful of Crichton’s serious movies, The Divided Heart. It is about a Yugoslav woman (Yvonne Mitchell)—a survivor of Auchswitz who had been separated from her baby—and of her struggle ten years later to win her child back from the loving German couple who had subsequently adopted him. The theme was topical in that postwar Europe still contained many such displaced children, and the story (by Jack Wittingham and Richard Hughes) was based on a case heard before the United States Control Commission in Germany two years earlier.

A reviewer in the Daily Sketch decided that “a story unexampled in its human heartbreaking quality has been screened with dignity and art….But above all this is a directors’ picture, and Charles Crichton’s greatest success is his handling of ten-year-old Michael Ray,” who played the wretched child. C.A. Lejeune also thought that “Charles Crichton’s direction is good direction in that it guides but never checks good players in the course they are naturally inclined to take.” The Divided Heart won the British Academy award for the best performance by a British actress in 1954 (Yvonne Mitchell) and that for the best performance by a foreign actress (Cornell Borchers, who played the German mother). The film also received the United Nations award as the best film of 1954 and the Golden Laurel at the Edinburgh Festival.

Crichton made only one more film for Ealing, a flying drama called The Man in the Sky (Decision Against Time in the U.S.), released in 1957. Floods of Fear (Rank 1958) was followed by Law and Disorder (British Lion, 1958), a T.E.B. Clarke comedy begun by Henry Cornelius and completed by Crichton. Two more comedies followed—The Battle of the Sexes (1959), based on the James Thurber story “The Catbird Seat” and starring Peter Sellers, and The Boy Who Stole a Million (1961), for which Crichton was also co-author—both made for Bryanston Films.

In 1961 Crichton went to the United States to direct what was to have been his first Hollywood picture, The Birdman of Alcatraz. It is hard to imagine why he was ever considered for such an assignment, and in fact he left the production soon after shooting had begun, the film being completed by John Frankenheimer. Some fourteen years later Crichton told an interviewer what had happened: “Had I known that Burt Lancaster was to be de facto producer,” he said, “I do not think I would have accepted that assignment as he had a reputation for quarreling with better directors than I. But Harold Hecht, the credited producer, had assured me that there would be no interference from Lancaster. This did not prove to be the case.”

Back in England, Crichton made The Third Secret (1964), an intelligent psychological thriller with an impressive cast (it

includes Jack Hawkins, Patricia Neal, Diane Cilento, and Steve McQueen. His last feature film, He Who Rides a Tiger (1965) is a drama about a criminal (Tom Bell) who tries to go straight when he falls in love (with Judi Densch). Since then Crichton has made two documentaries, Tomorrow’s Island (1968), about the island of Dominica, and London—Through My Eyes (1970), a tongue-in-cheek portrait of London as seen by a young Swedish singer. In 1956 Crichton had made a television version of Ibsen’s Wild Duck, and after 1965 he became increasingly involved in that medium, directing episodes in several popular British series including The Avengers and Danger Man (both 1965), Man in a Suitcase (1967), and The Adventures of Black Beauty (1972 and 1973).

Charles Crichton is an untemperamental and self-effacing craftsman—an immensely skillful interpreter of scripts rather than an original creator. According to Film Dope, “the sad thing for Crichton was that following the golden days at Ealing he available scripts got steadily more puerile and more vulgar and as a result—though one can only conjecture on what might have happened if Birdman had gone well—his decline was slow but inexorable. The more interesting of Crichton’s later films, like the comedies Law and Disorder and The Battle of the Sexes which (from memory) were funny enough to look really good in today’s barren comedy climate, only underline the shameful waste of his skills.”

Philip Kemp (FilmReference.com) The demise of Ealing Studios seemed to cast a blight on the careers of those who worked there. Within ten years of the final Ealing release virtually all the studio's leading directors—Mackendrick, Hamer, Harry Watt, Charles Frend—had shot their last film; only Basil Dearden was still active. And until the late 1980s the career of Charles Crichton appeared to have followed the same dispiriting pattern. His triumphant comeback at the age of seventy-eight, with

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the huge international success of A Fish Called Wanda , was as heartening as it was wholly unexpected.

Wanda kicks off with a jewel heist sequence notable for the wit and precision of its editing. Like several of his Ealing colleagues, Crichton started out in the cutting room, working for Korda on Things to Come and The Thief of Bagdad , and was said to be one of the finest editors in the British film industry. (Among his uncredited achievements is the rescue of Mackendrick's Whisky Galore , which he recut after it had been botched by its original editor.) A sense of pace and timing, the skilled editor's stock-in-trade, distinguishes all his best work. Comedy has always been seen as Crichton's forte. His reputation, prior to Wanda , rested on the three comedies he directed at Ealing to scripts by T. E. B. Clarke: Hue and Cry , The Lavender Hill Mob , and The Titfield Thunderbolt. If all three seem to belong more to the writer's oeuvre than to the director's, this may be because Crichton has always been dependent in his comedies on the quality of the script. The Lavender Hill Mob , perhaps the archetypal comedy of the Ealing mainstream, gains enormously from Crichton's supple comic timing; but given stodgy material, as in The Love Lottery or Another Shore, his lightness of touch deserts him. Even Titfield, with Clarke writing some way below his best, feels sluggish and under-directed beside its two predecessors.

Though the serious side of Crichton's output, the dramas and thrillers, has attracted little attention, he often seems here less at the mercy of his script, able to make something personal even of flawed material. His one non-comedy with Clarke, the Resistance drama Against the Wind , has a downbeat realism and a refusal of easy heroics that recalls Thorold Dickinson's Next of Kin (and probably ensured its failure at the post-war box-office). Hunted , a killer-on-therun thriller, builds up a complex tension as well as offering Dirk Bogarde a rare intelligent role amid the dross of his early career. Crichton's cool, unemphatic handling of the central conflict in The Divided Heart deftly avoids emotional overkill—though nothing, perhaps, could have prevented the film's final slide into sententiousness.

After Ealing, projects attuned to his talents became increasingly rare. Given the darker aspects of his work, black comedy was clearly well within his range, and The Battle of the Sexes , with Peter Sellers as the Scots clerk trying to bump off efficiency expert Constance Cummings, would have been ideal—were it not for a script that junked the quiet implacability of the original (Thurber's caustic tour-de-force The Catbird Seat ) for cautious whimsy and a vapid happy ending. After a couple of interestingly off-beat thrillers— The Third Secret and He Who Rides a Tiger —both marred by clumsy writing and uncertainty of tone, Crichton cut his losses and retreated into television. From there, directing corporate videos must have seemed like a further downhill step. But the company involved was John Cleese's Video Arts, and it was Cleese's enthusiastic backing—and his status as a bankable star—that enabled Crichton, after more than twenty years, to return to the cinema. A Fish Called Wanda, with its four ill-assorted crooks, its central portrait of respectability undermined by larcenous urges, and its running theme of internecine treachery, crosses The Lavender Hill Mob with The Ladykillers —and adds a degree of sex and violence that would certainly have alarmed Michael Balcon. But had Ealing comedy survived Balcon's death and lived on into the late 1980s, Wanda is most likely what it would have looked like—and its bite and vitality only inspire regret for the films left unmade during Crichton's years in the wilderness.

Death In 1989, a Danish audiologist, Ole Bentzen, died laughing while watching A Fish Called Wanda. His heart was estimated to have beaten at between 250 and 500 beats per minute, before he succumbed to cardiac arrest. (Wikipedia)

John Cleese: “Ode to Sean Hannity”

Aping urbanity Oozing with vanity Plump as a manatee Faking humanity Journalistic calamity Intellectual inanity Fox Noise insanity You’re a profanity Hannity

Monty Python (Wikipedia) Monty Python (sometimes known as The Pythons) were a British comedy group that created the influential Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series. The Python phenomenon developed from the television series into something larger in scope and impact, spawning touring stage shows, films, numerous albums, several books and a stage musical as well as launching the members to individual stardom. The group's influence on comedy has been compared to The Beatles' influence on music.

The television series, broadcast by the BBC from 1969 to 1974, was conceived, written and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Loosely structured as a sketch show but with an innovative stream-of-consciousness approach (aided by Gilliam's animation), it pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in style and content.

A self-contained comedy team responsible for both writing and performing their work, they changed the way performers entertained audiences. The Pythons' creative control allowed them to experiment with form and content, discarding rules of television comedy. Their influence on British comedy has been apparent for years, while in North America it has coloured the work of cult performers from the early editions of Saturday Night Live through to more recent absurdist trends in television comedy. "Pythonesque" has entered the English lexicon as a result.

In a 2005 UK poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, three of the six Pythons members were voted by fellow comedians and comedy insiders to be among the top 50 greatest comedians ever: Cleese at #2, Idle at #21, and Palin at #30.

November 16, 2010 (XXI:12) Charles Crichton, A FISH CALLED WANDA (1988, 108 min)

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2010 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS November 23 Joel & Ethan Coen The Big Lebowski 1998

November 30 Chan-wook Park Oldboy 2003 December 7 Deepa Mehta Water 2005

PRELIMINARY SPRING 2011 SCHEDULE, BFS XXII:

Jan 18 Fritz Lang, Metropolis, 1927 Jan 25 Lloyd Bacon, 42nd Street 1933 Feb 1 Ernst Lubitsch, Ninotchka 1939

Feb 8 Luchino Visconti Ossessione 1942 Feb 15 Robert Bresson, Journal d’un curé de campagne 1950 Feb 22 Martin Ritt, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 1965

Mar 1 Nicholas Roeg, Walkabout 1971 Mar 8 Clint Eastwood, The Outlaw Josey Wales 1976 Mar 22 John Mackenzie, The Long Good Friday 1980

Mar 29 Bernard Tavernier, Coup du torchon 1981 Apr 5 Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo 1982 Apr 12 Stephen Frears The Grifters 1991

Apr 19 Jafar Panahi, The Circle 2000 Apr 26 Ridley Scott, Blade Runner1982

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