Otley [VHS]

This is one of the funniest and best British films of the sixties and the only film I remember loving on its first release that I haven't been able to see again. Come on, rights owners, get it together!

Spy spoof Otley is a classic wrong man comedy thriller setup, given some novelty by the fact that rather than a well-to-do Richard Hannay or Bulldog Drummond for its hero it offers instead Tom Courtney's ne'er do well layabout Gerald Arthur Otley who's perpetually short of cash and exhausting the patience of his friends. He only gets involved because, having been evicted from his furnished flat for selling all the furnishings down at Portobello Market, he persuades a customer to give him a bed for the night only for the unfortunate blackmailer to end up dead and Otley to wake up 24 hours later on the runway at Gatwick Airport with police and Romy Schneider's spy out to find out not so much what he knows but whether he actually knows anything in the first place.

One of director Dick Clement and his writing partner La Frenais' better original screenplays, there's not a great deal to it, but it does have fun poking fun at the odd genre convention - the police couldn't be more polite and helpful while the film's car chase happens while Courtney is taking his driving test - and you can spot a few jokes in the health farm scenes that they would recycle in their uncredited rewrite for Bond film Never say Never Again. As with many of their films, there's an impressive supporting cast of reliable British players - Leonard Rossiter as an assassin-cum-coach tour operator, Freddie Jones giving a performance uncannily like John Sessions as a camp handler of stolen information, James Villiers as the upper crust type playing both sides of the intelligence divide against each other, Alan Badel in an outrageous wig, Phyllida Law looking uncannily like her daughter Emma Thompson, James Bolam, Fiona Lewis, Frank Middlemass, Ronald Lacey, Edward Hardwicke, Geoffrey Bayldon and a slew of other familiar faces even in the bit parts. It doesn't add up to much, so it's not to surprising it ended up on the wrong half of a double-bill on its cinema release, but it's enjoyable enough while you're watching it to pass muster and makes an interesting companion piece to Clement and La Frenais' earlier Catch Me a Spy which also featured Courtney in a supporting role.

Long deleted on video, the film is availble in the US as part of Columbia's manufactured-on-demand DVD-R program, offering a decent widescreen transfer but no extras.