Yesterday Patty thought we needed a break, so she went to youtube and found us one of the funniest movies we’ve ever seen.
Clockwise (1986) stars John Cleese as Mr. Stimson, a headmaster at an English public school. In his youth, Mr. Stimson had a terrible problem managing time. He overcame it by becoming a pompous control freak obsessed with being on time, and has just been elected chairman of a national headmasters’ conference.
The premise is simple: Stimson has to go to the conference and give a speech. What ensues is a bizarre train of errors, each one worse than the last, as Stimson tries to make it to the conference on time. The cast is chock-full of persons you’ve already seen in many British sitcoms: Geoffrey Palmer (As Time Goes By), Stephen Moore (The Thin Blue Line), Anne Way and Pat Keen (Fawltey Towers), and Joan Hickson (Miss Marple, plus assorted Carry On movies), and several others. And they are all at their best! No one ever babbled and dithered better than Joan Hickson.
You’d think it’d be a fairly straightforward errand, to go to a conference and give a speech–but you wouldn’t believe how complicated it gets. It’s like one of those nightmares in which your feet stick to the ground, you lose your clothes, the police are looking for you, and so on. Those things aren’t so funny when they happen to you, but they’re a scream when they happen to John Cleese.
Laughter is one of God’s gifts, and not the least of them. And this film will give you barrels of it. Try it, you’ll like it.