Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

SnoopyStyle It's 1861 Rev Francis Ashby (Michael Palin) is a senior Oxford teacher holidaying alone in the Alps. He meets the American family Hartleys. Young Elinor (Trini Alvarado) is especially taken with Mr Ashby. None of the teachers are allowed to marry. When Elinor and Caroline Hartley surprise him arriving at Oxford, they aren't even allowed to stay on the College grounds. Oliver Syme (Alfred Molina) is a scheming new-thinker, and becomes a challenger to the morally unblemished Ashby for the post of College President.Michael Palin wrote the story, and probably has taken great personal stakes in this movie. It seems that much effort has been put into maintaining the authenticity in the relationship between the sexes. The monastic feel of college life can be a very trying watch. It's very stale and not very exciting. Even a great debate sound dry and uninteresting.The woman's touch allows the movie to gain a bit of color. Michael Palin is painfully reserved. There is an intense love story amidst the sexual repression to be had, but the pacing is so slow that it never gains the energy to lift off. Palin and Alvarado need more time together. The movie gains some altitude when they are hiding in his room. However the emphasis keeps being pushed to the developing scandal rather than the developing romance. Instead of a love story, it's a story of propriety.

writers_reign This was screened late last night on the BBC and provided another chance to see this excellent film written by and starring Michael Palin who based the story on his own great-grandfather who left Oxford to marry a woman he met whilst on holiday. Public School/Universities are, of course, something the British film industry does very well, indeed the Original (1951) The Browning Version with Michael Redgrave is one of the finest British films of all time and American Friends makes a fine addition to the ranks. The mores of 1860s Oxford are beautifully captured and full of details and the late Robert Eddison, primarily a stage actor, brings his mellifluous second-only-to-Gielgud voice fully to bear in all his scenes. Palin also captures to perfection the product of years of conditioning on the verge of becoming set in his ways and then undergoing a life-changing meeting. There is strong support all round with Connie Booth turning in a just-right reading of a maturing woman daring to hope for a bite at the cherry and hiding her disappointment and Alfred Molina more or less phoning in his standard cad about campus. Excellent.

paul2001sw-1 Set about one hundred years ago, in Europe and England, this tale of repressed love initially feels like a re-working of 'A Room with a View', with the list of who fell for whom slightly re-arranged. But its portrait of Victorian England seems deliberately exaggerated: a woman can't speak to a college fellow without ruining his reputation, it seems, or talk to a man after dark without being arrested as a whore. Yet there's a charm here that grows on you, in spite of its obviousness. What is perhaps a shame is the missed opportunity presented by the fact that there hero's opponent (in a college election) is an advocate of evolution, which by implication the hero opposes: but the film does not force its favourite to defend his creed. I liked odd bits of casting: Alfred Molina playing sexy, for example, and Roger Lloyd-Peck (Trigger in 'Only Fools and Horses') playing posh. But the script itself, though cute, could have done with some of the same originality.

trimmerb1234 I confess that I've never found Michael Palin very funny. His desperate mugging in "A Fish Called Wanda" marked a particular low. And his many, many travel documentaries have at times stretched to breaking point his ability to say something interesting about his journeys. But, and against type, his finest work as performer and writer is "American Friends" and it is very fine indeed. Based on the true story of his great grandfather, it is a wonderful, gently comic evocation of the claustrophobic lives - and obligatory bachelorhood - of 1860's Oxford University academics (the repressive world which spawned Lewis Carrol). A wonderfully rich, gently comic performance too by veteran Robert Eddison as the dying head of the college, surrounded at the end simply by his college fellows. Entirely devoted to academic excellence and religiosity, only occasional male horseplay for some ever interrupted their high-minded bachelor lives. The natural candidate to take over as head of the college, the Palin character, thus seemed fated to live and die within its confines just as had his predecessor. Reluctantly persuaded to take a short walking summer holiday alone in the (beautifully filmed) Swiss Alps, suddenly into his late bachelor life comes Womanhood, Beauty - and Love - in the shapes of a middle-aged American lady and her young ward. Again a wonderful poignant dignified performance by Connie Booth; her young ward's youth and beauty making her suddenly aware that her own looks and prospects are now both very much on the downward slope.An inauthentic jarring note was Alfred Molina's portrayal of Palin's academic rival; so openly leering, crude and dissolute, it was difficult to imagine that he could have coexisted with his high-minded fellows - unless they were so very unworldly that they failed to understand him.Curiously very reminiscent indeed of "Goodbye Mr Chips" (1935), arguably American Friends is a far better film; subtle, gentle and beautiful. Palin was a student at Oxford and there is affection, respect and an intense attention to period feel in his portrayal of the character and the place.