Film Reviews by CH

I have just caught up with this, and not read the other reviews here - want to keep it fresh.

Highly enjoyable. What with the lush small-town setting, the wayward police force, the twists between outrageous humour and equally dramatic surprises, not to mention jibes by bolshie teeangers, this is very much Twin Peaks territory - without the cherry pie and coffee.

And it has an adroit ending (say no more).

Although I have a penchant for English comedies of this period, this one is somewhat slack in the telling. That said, it is carried along by the adroit

performances given many of the seasoned actors. And, in these times, there is a peculiar horror to the opening scenes when the pupils take to the school's driveway with placards to protest about the arrival of somebody from France.

An early work by Milos Forman, and discussed very interestingly by him in a 2000 interview as an extra item for half an hour. Perhaps not quite as unified in its episodic structure as the subsequent A Blonde in Love but with a similar humour which - as Forman says - was a way of contending with the Czech authorities at that time (pilfering in an early form of self-service store). And, again, there is a use of Czech pop songs with a distinct beat-group sound.