The Guardian Unlimited – Friday 10th September, 1999

The Guardian film editor Andrew Pulver provides an insight to the directorial debut of Bruce Robinson.

Withnail And I

One-time actor Bruce Robinson (he starred in François Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H) decided to write himself a movie in the mid-80s, and it turned out to be one of the most quotable, most admired, and most cultish British films of the decade. Apart from making the career of Richard E Grant, who described the nerve-wracking process of winning the title role in his autobiography With Nails, Robinson’s film has gone down in legend as the originator of the “Camberwell carrot”, a gigantic six-paper example of the old herbal refreshment.

Robinson’s rambling story describes the activities of a pair of “resting” actors, eking out a miserable existence in late-60s Camden Town; when their rat-infested lifestyle gets too much, off they go to Withnail’s Uncle Monty’s cottage in the back of beyond, to be menaced by over-frisky bulls, scowling poachers, and the like.

Robinson teamed up with Grant for his next film, How To Get Ahead in Advertising, but his directorial career hit the buffers when Jennifer Eight, his serial-killer-of-blind-girls thriller tanked disastrously in 1992. But Withnail lives on, its enduring popularity reinforced by a recent cinema reissue that only points up how fresh its humour is.