Clockwise – Recht so, Mr. Stimpson (1986)

Clockwise – Recht so, Mr. Stimpson: Directed by Christopher Morahan. With John Cleese, Penny Leatherbarrow, Howard Lloyd-Lewis, Jonathan Bowater. An obsessively punctual comprehensive school headmaster sets out to give an important speech at the annual Headmasters’ Conference.

“The secret of this comedy is its pacing. It shows the events of one working day in the lives of a range of people from schoolchildren to pensioners, whose course is hilariously skewed for them all by the obsession of the filmu0026#39;s central character. It uses a traditional u0026quot;obsessive tunnel visionu0026quot; strategy of comedy – a characteru0026#39;s failure to see the chaos he is causing in the lives of those who are unlucky enough to lie in the path between him and his goal.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAlison Steadman plays the sassy schoolgirl who does everything she can to help her headteacher achieve this obsession, tearing him between his drive for the peak of respectability orthodoxy and her less than respectable means to achieve this goal. The comic tension between the unlikely pair seems a hilarious pastiche of the sexual tension in most hero + heroine situations.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAmericans may not immediately recognise the small-town England setting, which gives it a tone of Ealing comedy, but the film should greatly amuse viewers from any background.”