Cinema
Mad Dogs and Englishmen (`18, selected cinemas)
Remote canoodling
Mark Steyn
Elizabeth Hurley is such a perfect model of contemporary short-cut celebrity — famous for wearing a dress to someone else's movie — that it's a pity she has to go and risk denting her legend by doing any- thing so prosaic as making a film. Still, she's been shrewd enough to pick Mad Dogs And Englishmen, which has something for everyone: there are lush Brideshead vis- tas, but also savage-indictments-of-Major's- Britain-with-accompanying-rock-music; there are Swingin' Sixties parties in Chelsea bachelor pads, but also a couple of sadistic footpads straight out of Oliver!; there is a barmaid from an Ealing comedy and an incestuous sub-plot from the Cement Garden school; this film even revives the old tradition whereby the token American star brought over to improve box-office prospects is someone who doesn't sell any tickets anyway. It's every available genre of British film in a single picture, after which Liz can get back to the serious business of modelling safety-pins. She doesn't, sadly, model any safety-pins here, presumably because they're all being used to hold the script together. My own project, Reservoir Dogs And Englishmen, in which a critically acclaimed gang of Tarantino thugs is gunned down by a Mer- chant-Ivory cast crazed with jealousy, made more sense.
There is a lot of plot, but, whenever it gets going, Liz totters off to the bathroom with a roll of kitchen foil and half a pound of Shake'n'Vac and lights up. These are probably the ideal conditions under which to view the film. Liz comes from a typical English family; her father has a title and her mother took an overdose. 'I couldn't talk to you,' she tells him. 'You're always in the City doing deals and all that business. I thought you wanted a boy.' Liz takes up with a motorcycle dispatch rider, but on the whole spends more time dispatching him than riding him. Every time he thinks he's in for a Hurley night, she sends him over to louche Jeremy Brett's place to pick up some powder. The biker is an American, so Brett fills him in on British society. 'Let me tell you about class, dear boy,' he drawls, and explains that the Queen is a hopeless 'middle-class non-entity' because, unlike the aristocracy, she doesn't have a $300-a- day coke habit. These are the subtleties of our social system: it's not what you know, it's what you nose. Brett is playing a CD of Salome, but the motorcycle courier would rather get back to Liz and play hide the salami. Obligingly, the Hurley bird catches the sperm, though the half-hearted orgas- mic moaning sounds more like Hugh Grant doing his Flopsy Bunny impressions.
A few hours later, Daddy discovers Liz and the motorcycle courier in post-coital slumber with Bacofoil smouldering at the end of the bed and, instead of assuming that she'd had salmon en croute sent round from Domino's, he informs Paula Hamil- ton that his daughter's a drug fiend and he's cancelling her allowance. 'It's not that simple,' she says. Paula Hamilton is the cel- ebrated model from the Volkswagen and several important Hello! magazine features, and she met the film's director/author, Henry Cole, at a Narcotics Anonymous group. Apparently under the impression that she really is anonymous, Cole has given her the credit 'Introducing Paula Hamilton', which is a bit like saying 'Intro- ducing Tony Slattery'. Paula plays an interi- or decorator, which means that, while everyone else lounges about decorating the interior of their nasal passages, Paula looks purposefully at the wallpaper.
The American biker is played by C. Thomas Howell. See Thomas bleat: 'What you doin' to yourself with your fuckin' lifestyle?' he says. 'I really want us to work out.' C. Thomas decides to beard Liz's father and gatecrashes lunch at his club: 'Just maybe if you would talk to her and admit that you love her, she might have a chance.' It works on Oprah, but not in Pall Mall. 'Long-haired American shit,' hisses Daddy. But soon they are all brought together, when bent copper and part-time rapist Joss Ackland sends his thugs to kill Liz because he's been chucked by Claire Bloom and the surveillance team has dis- covered that Jeremy Brett is on the bonk with Sandy, the incestuously inclined junkie daughter Ackland covets. Like all the other junkies in this film, she is very beautiful with perfect skin. Nonetheless, the bent copper cuts off her nose to spite his case. Oh, did I mention Patrick Lichfied? He plays Patrick Lichfield.
Most of the production budget seems to have gone on the Bacofoil, which is almost as warmed over as the script. Otherwise, from the opening titles, when disc-jockey Alan Freeman gives the weather in Fahren- heit (long banned under the Eurofiihrers), nothing in this film rings true — except inadvertently when Liz and her lover are canoodling in a remote rural idyll and you can hardly hear the dialogue above the background noise of roaring traffic: at last, an authentic picture of the English countryside.
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