One of the things I like so much about A Fish Called Wanda is that it’s one of the few movies, if any, that can claim the distinction of causing a death. I’m not talking about all that Moral Majority B.S. that sprung up when psychopaths saw movies like Child Play 3 and Natural Born Killers and just wanted to kill people No, this movie accidentally led to a person’s death. This is funny because a subplot revolves around a character trying in vain to kill a person.
The following will include spoilers but this movie has been out for 35 years and if you’ve been too foolish not to see it by now, you only have yourself to blame.
The movie involves a diamond heist and the farcical exploits that happen as the characters double-cross each other. Two of the thieves, Otto West (Kevin Kline) a former CIA operative, tortures his partner in crime, Ken Pile (Michael Palin), by tying him up. Ken knows where the diamonds are stored after their other partner, George Thomason (Tom Georgeson), has moved them. Ken has a bad stutter which Otto constantly mocks him for.
And while he’s tied up, Otto eats chips (French Fries to the American audiences) and begins to question Ken who can’t respond. So, each wrong answer, Otto shoves a chip up each nostril. Reportedly there was a Belgian, Ole Bentzen, in the audience at a theater who began laughing so hard. Years earlier at a family dinner, Bentzen and his family members began to shove cauliflower up their noses. It must be something they do a lot in Europe.
Bentzen laughed so hard his heart rate increased to an outrageous 250 beats per minute reportedly and he suffered a fatal heart attack. While it might sound outlandish, the French flatulist, Joseph Pujol, under the stage name Le Petomane, would have nurses in the aisles at his theater shows because people were laughing so hard it hurt. Pujol had an odd medical condition where he could manipulate his sphincter muscles sucking in air and releasing. In other words, he could fart on command.
For anyone who knows Palin or his Wanda co-star John Cleese, who co-wrote the script, this is the type of thing they probably laughed about. Cleese and Palin were part of the iconic comedy troupe Monty Python which pushed the envelope as much as they could, offending whoever they felt like and pulled no punches. Ken is the abovementioned character who tries to kill an elderly woman, Eileen Coady (Patricia Hayes), as she was a witness who identified George to the authorites.
But Ken is also a huge animal lover and Coady has three Yorkshire Terriers who are vicious mongrels that Ken keeps accidentally killing much to his heartbreak. In the end, he gets some karma because Otto eats his treasured tropical fish to further torture him. This also includes the titular character, a large angelfish, who Ken treats like a child. So, if none of this sounds interesting to you, you’re probably not going to like this movie.
Going back to the beginning, George, a weasely Englishman, has planned a robbery of a major jewelry in London with Ken, who is his flatmate. Also assisting them is George’s American lover, Wanda Gershwitz (Jamie Lee Curtis), who has brought along her brother, Otto. Except Otto isn’t really her brother but a wannabe soldier of fortune she has found who knows how. Aside from having Coady recognize George when she walks out into the road as they’re trying to get away, the robbery goes smoothly.
They split up with Ken driving off on a motorcycle tossing their equipment in a garbage truck that was scheduled to go by. And George, Wanda and Otto take off in a compact car to a garage where they leave the car and put the jewels, mostly diamonds totally about $20 million, in a safe. But what they don’t know is that George returns to move the diamonds. Wanda and Otto report him to the police who come and arrest him. At the jewelers, Otto had kicked some glass in a door knowing it would get on George’s pants to help authorites.
But when they get to the garage, Otto cracks open the safe to find it empty. However, Wanda was about to knock him unconscious with a blackjack weapon. Now, they got a problem. George has moved the loot and he suspects someone, i.e. Otto, turned him in. He’s moved the diamonds to a safety deposit box at a hotel near Heathrow Airport and placed the key in a fish food container tossing it out the flat window for Ken to find.
His lawyer, Bartlett (Ken Campbell), is aware of the heist and working with George and Ken. But George’s barrister, Archie Leach (Cleese), is unaware and believes that George may be innocent because the evidence is circumstancial. Bartlett has told Archie the glass was from an accident that happened while helping a relative. Wanda tries to flirt with Archie to see if he will let anything slip.
Unfortunately, even though Archie is a well-respected barrister, his home life isn’t so glamorous. His wife, Wendy (Maria Aitken) is stuck up and snooty. His teenage daughter, Portia (Cynthia Caylor, Cleese’s real-life daughter) is also spoiled and often asks foolish questions which only irks Wendy more and she angrily responds, “Oh, do shut up, Portia!” As Wanda gets closer to Archie, it ignites a spark in him even though he’s worried about them talking a lot since it might interfere with the case as Wanda has been listed as a major trial witness.
The prosecution wants to try George as soon as possible since Coady is in poor health. George informs Ken to kill her to make it look like an accident, to which Otto finds out and mocks Ken because he doesn’t seem like the type. Even though he reads philosophy like Friedrich Nietzche and believes in Zen meditation, Otto is quick to violence and anger. He loves to scream “Asshole!” at people who irritate him and calls all English “limeys.”
In many ways Otto is a parody of the mentality that Americans are the best people in the world. He thinks he’s better than the English, but too cocky and arrogant that when his ramblings become incoherent, he hates being called “stupid.” He also swears a lot but gets offended when Archie calls him a “vulgarian.” Kline won an Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance and it was a surprise to a lot including Kline himself who said he was a dark horse. What makes his character so memorable is Kline walks a fine line between a caricature but also making him three-dimensional. It’s one thing to play a fool. It’s another to play a fool who thinks he’s the smartest person in the world.
Cleese would later say that test audiences liked the character so much they were upset Otto is killed in an earlier version. I’ve researched and my own conclusion is that Otto was supposed to have died when he is run over by a steamroller driven by Ken which buries him in wet cement. And that shows you how crazy a movie like this is where a character is ran over by a steamroller in wet cement. Remember Cleese is a Monty Python. One of their most famous bits was in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where he played the Black Knight who keeps fighting King Arthur after his arms and legs are cut off.
What makes us sympathize with the main characters is even though they’re bad, others are worse. Archie may be the most sympathetic because he seems stuck in a love-less marriage with a wife who doesn’t have enough to divorce him on without losing money in the settlement. Wendy even seems to despise her own daughter. And while Wanda double-crosses George, he acts too pompous and arrogant to begin with. Did it ever cross his mind that Wanda turned him in? He still believes Otto is the one they have to deal. Coady from the moment she’s shown is a crotchety person snide and hostile to everyone and her behavior has worn off on her dogs. Despite his behavior, everyone knows someone like Otto who is too, well stupid, to see how foolish he is.
I first saw this movie during the summer of 1989 when it premiered on HBO. I knew Curtis and Kline and had seen Cleese before in The Great Muppet Caper. I didn’t know who Palin was and didn’t know of Monty Python. I knew about Eric Idle. Regardless, it was my first introduction to the Pythons. I think I watched this movie once a week for months as we had recorded it on VHS. For years, I thought Otto was calling people “Slimey.”
I was also surprsed when Otto eats the Wanda fish. Kline wanted to eat real fish but the production vetoed his decision. There also was supposed to be additional footage or script pages in which Otto shoots alley cats. While I’m an animal lover too, the joke is that Ken doesn’t hesitate to harm Coady but gets his punishment by inadvertently killing the terriers as well as having to watch his pet fish being eaten.
In many ways, the movie is a like an R-rated Marx Brothers movie where Ken is Harpo, Otto is Groucho, Archie is Chico and Wanda is the Margaret Dumont character but she’s the object of their affection rather than their comic foil. One particular scene involves Wanda trying to seduce Archie but Otto getting too concerned she is going too far and sneaks in the house. But what neither know is Wendy and Portia, who were supposed to see an opera, had car trouble not far away and returned home. There’s a silliness of perfect timing as they all move around trying to avoid detection.
Even when Otto bursts in and pretends to be a CIA agent with a made up name that Wendy repeats as it’s common, to help Archie out who doesn’t want to say Wanda is hiding nearby, it’s hilarious in how every actor performs the scene including Cleese who at one point stares off into space with a dumbfounded “This can’t be real” look.
Wanda was Chrichton’s final movie after coming out of retirement. He spent five years working on the script with Cleese. MGM initially put Cleese’s name on the credits as co-director in hopes of attracting a bigger audience. It must’ve worked. Produced on a small budget of $7.5 million, it made a whopping $188 million worldwide. And Chrichton got a Best Director Oscar nomination along with a Best Original Screenplay nomination with Cleese.
While there’s not many scenes between Cleese and Palin, it’s still a nice Monty Python reunion as Archie rescues Ken from being tied up as Ken tries to tell Archie where the safety deposit box is but can’t because of his stutter. Palin’s parents reportedly stuttered which Cleese knew when he wrote the role for Ken. Even though the stutter is mocked by Otto, it only makes Otto more deserving of being run over by a steamroller.
Cleese and Curtis together actually have a great chemisty it’s easy to see how they can become smitten for each other. A running gag of the movie is the two of them often being interrupted in one way or the other as they are trying to be intimate. I won’t say how the best gag works because it’s wonderful in the way it’s handled mostly because of Cleese’s delivery. He’s always been kinda the model of what Americans would think of an Englishman. That might be why some of his famous skits, such as The Ministry of the Silly Walk, work so well because he’s always been able to use that snooty, uppity British stereotype to his advantage.
In 1985, Kline and Cleese shared the screen in Silverado, a western that was almost an homage to the older era westerns. Cleese appeared as a sheriff briefly where he used the same persona in a comical way that also serious. Archie’s name is a reference to the birth name of Cary Grant, who Cleese reportedly admired. Grant passed away in 1986 before the movie went into production and Cleese said, this is the way way he’d ever play a Grant character. Kline and Cleese work together so well also you just have the admire each scene where they’re together and how much fun it was to film them. I imagine the crew members biting their lips to keep from laughing.
Unfortunately, Wanda was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle once-in-a-lifetime moments that couldn’t be duplicated. Cleese, Kline, Curtis and Palin all tried to reunite in the mid-1990s on Fierce Creatures, a spiritual successor, with Aitken, Caylor and Georgeson in supporting roles. But the movie had a troubled production with reshoots and rewrites along with scheduling conflicts which required Fred Schepisi having to replace director Robert Young who was unavailable. In a rare move, it’s one of the few times more than one director received credit without them being a team. Dexter Fletcher was credited as an executive producer when he was brought in to finish production on Bohemian Rhapsody after Bryan Singer had been fired as director.
Cleese would later say Creatures was a mistake. The movie received lukewarm reviews and only grossed $40 million worldwide against a $25 million budget. Along with his turmulent marriage and divorce to Alyce Eichelberger, Cleese called Creatures one of the biggest regrets of his life he wished he could change. Well, after creating two iconic TV programs (Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers) and making some of the funniest movies of all time, you can’t always have a winner.
But Wanda is one of those winners, that still gets better and better every time you see it.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 