Following the release of Withnail & I Bruce Robinson again chose Richard E Grant to star in his next movie, this time a farcical satire on the rampant greed of the Thatcher era. It's never achieved anything like the cult status of it's predecessor, so how does it stand up now?
Denis Bagley (Grant) is a hugely successful, and wealthy, advertising executive, struggling to come up with an idea to sell pimple cream. He starts to break down under the strain, and understand the immorality of the business he's in. But when a large boil grows on his shoulder, and begins to talk for him, he loses his grip on reality. The boil, which has an even nastier personality than Bagley had before his epiphany, eventually takes him over and returns to work full of ideas for making punters part with their money.
Subtle it's not. There's none of the sophistication that would later characterise the likes of Brass Eye in showing up the follies of government. The plot wanders about with no real sense of narrative, and it's lacking in memorable lines. Grant does his best with the Bagley character, but seems driven to overact at times to compensate. Richard Wilson as his boss is the best of the bunch, but Rachel Ward's wooden performance as Mrs Bagley makes you wonder how she ever went on to have a successful career. And the technology available in the eighties to create the verbalising pustule now looks extremely dated in a world of CGI.
This one hasn't stood the test of time.
[At the Q&A for Withnail & I the night before this screening, somebody suggested that Withnail & I was in some ways a Brexit movie. That certainly didn't come across to me, but it's clearly the case with How To get Ahead. The ability of the ad men to sell people anything, even when it's against their own interests, has a resonance that can't be ignored....]
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