A Fish Called Wanda Details

A Fish Called Wanda

In A FISH CALLED WANDA, veteran director Charles Crichton and scriptwriter-star John Cleese create a dazzling quilt from various strands of English and American comedy. The plot, in which four disparate characters attempt a daring heist, comes from Ealing caper comedies, such as Crichton's own THE LAVENDER HILL MOB. Cleese and Michael Palin, as the hit man with a stutter and a love of animals, come from the anarchic tradition of Monty Python. The movie pays savage tribute to another Ealing comedy, THE LADYKILLERS, as Palin attempts to kill a witness to the gang's getaway. The glamorous con woman (Jamie Lee Curtis) is from Preston Sturges's great comedy THE LADY EVE, while Kevin Kline provides his own unique feverish comic intensity.
But, in the midst of this breathless comedy, something else happens. The barrister, Archie Leach (Cleese), who is defending one of the gang, is jolted out of his tight-laced British existence by Curtis's life force. And Curtis--like Barbara Stanwyck in THE LADY EVE--falls into her own trap: falling in love with the man she's conning. The 78-year-old Crichton never before had such rich material. He times everything in this brilliant comedy with the precision of a Swiss watch.

Starring	John Cleese, Michael Palin, Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis
Director	Charles Crichton
Studio	MGM ENTERTAINMENT
Run time	DVD: 1 hr 43 mins
Certificate
Collections	100 Rom-Coms
Genres	Comedy
Language	English
Dubbed	German
Hearing-impaired	English, German
Subtitles	Croatian, Danish, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish
Released	DVD: 10 Feb 2003 Production year: 1988
Format	DVD