Sir Henry at Rawlinson End

I saw this film in the Cinecenta in Panton Street when it was first released. I was so surprised that I went back in to watch it a second time. That was probably not the best use of £3.25 but I didn't regret the spending of it. I have seen it many times since and am still filled with that original sense of awe and mystification. And I love to share it. The sheer poetry and feeling of Theatre de Absurdisme. The unpredictability and blunt refusal to genuflect at the altar of political correctness (gone mad).

I recently had the opportunity of watching it with an American film buff. At the end he turned to me and asked "Can you tell me what that was about?" From this I gathered that American film buffs need to know about things like themes and analysis. Anyway, the answer still is that I don't know what this film is "about", any more than I know what my son's haircut is "about".

Some years ago I had the chance to ask Vernon Dudley Bowhay-Nowell (the ukulele player who gets stabbed with the bison horn) what it was all about. He didn't know either.

I've seen this movie twice and yet still can't make head or tail of it. However, that doesn't prevent it from being near on brilliant, perhaps the lamentably late Vivian Stanshall's masterpiece. Trevor Howard as Sir Henry rambles on pompously (and nonsensically) and maintains a bunker which houses two guys who pretend it's still World War II for Howard's sake. There's some sort of plot involving exorcising Howard's brother's ghost (played by Stanshall) and a sub-plot involving Patrick Magee as a Reverend up to no good (can't figure out what sort of no good, however). The extremely low production values add to the feeling of run-down old money that make this dada narrative so damn funny. It's also got some good music and Howard in blackface on a unicycle. Director Steve Roberts was responsible for writing the Max Headroom TV show, of which I have extremely fond but vague memories.

I don't have a lot to add to the previous comments - just wanted to get that one-line summary in.

I saw "Sir Henry" when it first came out, not knowing the Bonzos or Viv Stanshall at the time and not knowing the characters' previous incarnations. Sometimes baffling but incredibly amusing. The "German" prisoners are wonderful. Sound was pretty bad, a problem for American viewers given the thick, country-ish English accents. Most annoying during the scene where Old Scrotum sings a comic song at a (comically) ratty town festival of some kind. I was laughing, but not knowing exactly why.

Direction is good, too. Alan Mowbray and Peter Chelsom are the only other true representatives of this drolly rambling style, and Roberts seems to have given it up subsequently. There's definitely a method to the madness.

Favorite lines: "Germany calling!" "Fetch me my antlers - no, not those antlers - the ones I use to deface Reader's Digest!"

"The cracks are showing, listen to the loonies croon". Perhaps the most remarkable thing among many remarkable things about this film is that it was ever made. It is a surreal, nonsensical, sepia tinted memorial to a glorious, politically incorrect, past that never was that will nevertheless inspire a sense of nostalgia in every British viewer of a certain age. Beyond that, even to British viewers, it makes very little sense whatsoever. That however is to entirely miss the point. Whether the product of alcoholiday or derangement, or both, the film is a buried and largely unknown gem.

Buy the DVD! Why? - Because to watch the great Trevor Howard, seemingly perfectly in his element as the "brandy baffled rhinoceros Fuhrer" of Rawlinson End is, alone, worth the money; because you will almost certainly never see it on television again; because you will want to watch it time after time, (the second to at least actually confirm that you weren't hallucinating when you watched it the first), and then to get more and more of what is a very, very, rich seventy one minute running time. Some scenes don't work, but the pace of the film is so rapid you won't have the opportunity to become bored. Like me you may also get huge if guilty enjoyment out of casually slipping it into your DVD player when unsuspecting friends come to visit and you suggest they might like to watch a movie you've come across.

Having done that please also buy the album. Yes, there is an album, (not a soundtrack) which, in my opinion is even stranger and laugh out loud funnier than the film.

It's 18 years since I saw Sir Henry at the cinema. My friends and I had to go two nights in a row, just to make sure we hadn't imagined it the first time.

Sir Henry is a stroll through the mind of Director, writer, performer, and Bonzo Dog Band frontman Vivan Stanshall's mind - which, by the early 80's, was probably coming seriously unravelled. Fans of hard-core British surrealism absolutely must see this movie. Everyone else should probably avoid it. Rooms filled with rotting fruit, ghostly mechanical bulldogs, face-jumping competitions, and not least of all Sir Henry's Brother Hubert (Viv), who goes fishing for hairdressers. Stanshall's humour has far more in common with Dali than with Eddie Murphy, and the overwhelming majority of (at least, American) filmgoers will simply be stupified.

A few things should be said about sir Henry. First, Trevor Howard, in the lead role, plays such a magnificent drunk that it's a little hard to believe he was putting it on (I do believe it was his last movie.) Secondly, the film alternately plods and lurches in such a fashion that , as with early Woody Allen films, you'll find yourself sitting through a fair bit of material that doesn't work, just for the blinding moments when it comes together. Thirdly, as wonderful as this movie is (and despite its faults, my memory insists it _is_ quite wonderful), it isn't as good as the album. Sir Henry the film is terrific. Sir Henry the LP is a comic masterpiece; Stanshall's finest moment.

8 out of 10.