A simple and painless diversion about a tortuous and torturous detour. The time-budgeting, second-squeezing headmaster of Thomas Tompion Comprehensive School, and the first such non-posh headmaster ever in history to be selected as chairman and keynote speaker of the Annual Headmasters Conference at Norwich University, gets aboard the wrong train en route to the conference when the vernacular use of "right" as an affirmative is misunderstood instead as a directive: it couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy. John Cleese, sometimes of the Monty Python group, is, like such American counterparts as the Saturday Night Live alumni, too much a "sketch" artist for any detailed character drawing: when shall we ever get a decent replacement for Peter Sellers? But his very broadness makes sure you don't miss even the most throw-away sort of joke, and he is especially and endearingly funny in his attempts to maintain unflappability in the face of a quickening gale of troubles: "I'm not late. I'm merely in a hurry." All the characterizations, come to that, tend to be of the broken-record variety: the rumpled music teacher who never -- repeat, never -- completes a sentence, or the rest-home resident who keeps rattling on about sherry glasses and nothing but. Repetition can often of course be funny in itself, and then, as here, it can stop being funny. The script by Michael Frayn dispenses much to tickle the ear, though the physical comedy descends more to the elbow-in-ribs level of grappling with malfunctioning payphones, crunching the fender of a police car, and taking a thoroughly disheartening pratfall in a mud pit. Directed by Christopher Morahan. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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