Great films are often birthed in on-set catastrophe. The legends surrounding the chaotic filming of Apocalypse Now have become a matter of film legend, part of the mystique. Titanic was so overbudget that it was the film that was supposed to take down not one, but two studios. So it is with Withnail and I, a film so damned from the first moment that the producers almost pulled the plug on what would become arguably the greatest British comedy ever.
Too grim, too miserable, no laughs, no stars. It’s no wonder that Denis O’Brien, co-founder of HandMade Films, almost cancelled production after one day of shooting. Why wouldn’t he? Paul McGann was a hot property off the success of his historical TV drama The Monocled Mutineer, but the Liverpudlian actor (here faking a Home Counties accent) and future Doctor Who was basically silent on set. Instead, he was shuffling through the mud of Cumbria in the far and most rural North of England behind complete newcomer Richard E. Grant, a gaunt and pallid specter with watery eyes rambling obscenities and madness. The only name star and reliable talent, HandMade regular Richard E. Griffiths, was barely in the first half of the script. The studio so soured on the project that writer/director Bruce Robinson had to pay for his own reshoots.
But, like Apocalypse Now, Withnail and I makes sense in its final form, complete with a narration. Adapting his own unpublished 1969 novel about two out-of-work and intoxicated actors, Robinson has McGann as the unnamed I (well, his name’s Marwood, but you’d never know) narrate his internal implosion as arrogant Withnail (Grant) drags him for a week in the country.
And how did this all work out for Denis O’Brien? Pretty well, really. HandMade Films had become the backbone of the British film industry, bolstered by the release of Monty Python films and associated projects like Time Bandits and The Missionary, and radical acts of political art like The Long Good Friday. Yet, for its subversive roots, by 1987 it was becoming the establishment, its comedies either pleasantly dated like 1984’s Ealing Studios pastiche A Private Function, or wildly out of touch with broader tastes, like the wildly unfunny Ealing Studios spoof Water. The disastrous attempt to court America with the captivatingly awful Shanghai Surprise.
They were becoming overshadowed by Channel 4 Films, which opened its slate in 1986 with the era-defining nuclear war animated feature When the Wind Blows and blazed through 1987 with provocative and exciting films like Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, an adaptation of E. M. Forster’s Maurice, and John Huston’s swan song, The Dead.
But Withnail and I was not the death rattle of the old guard, being shown up by these new TV upstarts. It was so vibrant, so scum-drenched, booze-sodden, and vital that only carnage cartoonist Ralph Steadman (best known for his collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson) could possibly do the poster.
This wasn’t a warm and drug-fuzzed look back at the end of the Swinging Sixties. This was a primal howl of self-destruction. Maybe if Robinson had got the book out as he originally planned (with its much bleaker ending in tact) then maybe it would have had more of that fin de siècle mournfulness. But by filming it after eight years of Margaret Thatcher’s regime, it becomes something of an accusation, summed up in a speech by Griffith as the tragic Uncle Monty. “Shat on by Tories, shoveled up by Labour.” If only the beat generation had got its shit together, the script screams, then maybe it wouldn’t have come down to the film’s ultimate choice between adhering to indulgence dressed as rebellion, or selling out to establishment blandness.
Everything is filthy, decaying, despairing. Swinging London is a cigarette butt smashed into an undercooked egg. Cumbria, portrayed so idyllically in children’s films like Swallows and Amazons, is a mire. The old guard has suffocated rebellion, and the youth clamped those hands around its own neck.
But, by its very existence, Withnail and I showed a spark of very British insurrection still burned.
- Withnail and I
- Directed by: Bruce Robinson
- Starring: Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann, Richard E. Griffiths
- 1987
- 107 minutes
Playlist
- He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother by The Hollies (1969)
- Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks (1967)
Further Viewing
- The Knack …and How to Get It (1965) D: Richard Lester
- The Party’s Over (1965) D: Guy Hamilton
- Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) D: Karel Reisz
Further Reading
- London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd (2000)
- Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges (2014)