A Fish Called Wanda mixes Ealing comedy with Pythonesque humour – but is it still funny?

A restored version of the 1988 heist farce screens at the Berlin Film Festival later this month, and what works has as much to do with the craft of John Cleese and director Charles Crichton as the squashed lapdogs and swallowed fish, says Geoffrey Macnab

Special relationship: John Cleese and Jamie Lee Curtis (Rex)

There is one key difference between A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and the comedies and dramas that its director Charles Crichton made at Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 1950s. The Ealing films famously projected Britain and the British character in a positive light. They were celebrations of both the resourcefulness and quiet eccentricity of the British. By complete contrast, A Fish Called Wanda, written by and starring John Cleese, sets out to skewer the British or, more specifically, the English. The humour at their expense is not affectionate at all.

“Wanda, do you have any idea what it’s like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of doing the wrong thing. We’re all terrified of embarrassment. That’s why we’re so… dead,” the lanky English barrister Archie Leach (Cleese) moans to the American femme fatale (Jamie Lee Curtis) he has fallen for. “Most of my friends are dead, you know. We have these piles of corpses to dinner.”

Three decades after it was made, A Fish Called Wanda, which is being screened this month at the Berlin Film Festival in a restored version, ​can’t help but seem like a period piece, an Ealing-style farce reimagined for the Thatcher era. Instead of celebrating collective endeavour, the film is all about cynical, opportunistic individuals, ready to betray one another at the slightest opportunity. It’s still very funny, full of puns, slapstick and surrealistic, Pythonesque humour.