This is a much funnier film than A Fish Called Wanda. A relatively simple concept, left versus right, winds up into a clock spring of comedy. The final scene brings together all the threads of all the characters and scenes visited en route, in a similar style as that of the traditional British farces (e.g. The Wrong Box) There are so many wonderful characters that to list them would be to take away from the experience of watching them and rolling about the floor in laughter, but I have to say that the old ladies on their outing from the Home are some of the funniest in the entire wonderful film. If there had ever been any doubt in anyone's mind that John Cleese was capable of sustaining an entire comedy movie without aid from the other members of Monty Python's Flying Circus, "Clockwise" should have convinced them. Not to be missed.

John Cleese plays Brian Stimpson, an efficient headmaster at an English school who, while on his way to a conference where he is to deliver a speech, misses his train, which launches him into an escalating series of misadventures as he desperately tries to reach the conference, no matter what...John Cleese is quite funny as the clock watching schoolmaster, and features a good cast of familiar British actors, but film is not all that funny really, being a one-joke premise stretched out to feature-length. Also, unlike Cleese's more famous character(Basil Fawlty from "Fawlty Towers") Stimpson isn't really that bad, and doesn't deserve these calamities, which seem mean-spirited.

Headmaster Brian Stimpson has built his reputation on being organised and running his school on a tight schedule organised right down to the minute. Such is the success of this approach that he has been elected the chairman of the Headmaster's Association and is due to give a speech to the association in Norwich. A simple mix up over right and left sees him miss his train and also miss a lift from his wife. A chance encounter with one of his sixth form in a car sees him able to beg a lift from her but that only causes more panic and confusion with his wife and the girl's parents assuming that he is in a relationship with her. Meanwhile on the road how eventful can a simple drive of less than 200 miles be?With John Cleese playing the sort of character he is well known for you pretty much know what you're going to get here in this precursor to Planes, Trains & Automobiles. The narrative arch sees us establishing the strictly organised Stimpson before then spending the rest of the film gradually putting him through increasingly comic blunders and delays as he tries to get to his destination on time. It is nothing that special or clever and the events are never that unexpected or imaginative. Personally I rarely laughed out loud but was reasonably amused by it throughout. Morahan's direction is pretty by-the-numbers and his touch is too obvious to be of much help.Cleese is the whole show and it is down to his playing that the film is worth even looking at. Sure his performance is not a million miles from characters he has played before but he is still good. His timing and awareness of his own absurdity helps the material. The rest fall in behind him but mostly the film is all about him and he is rarely offscreen. Overall then an average comedy that is more or less what you expect but should do enough to amuse if not have you roaring with laughter. Cleese makes it worth the while so, if you like him you'll be OK but if not this isn't worth bothering with.

In "Clockwise" John Cleese plays a character who has much in common with Basil Fawlty from the television series "Fawlty Towers". Like the manic Torquay hotelier, Brian Stimpson is a control-freak who finds his own life going out of control. The headmaster of a small-town comprehensive school, he is a stickler for discipline, with a particular obsession with punctuality. He is the sort of man who knows the school timetable off by heart; upon seeing a pupil idling about the school he can instantly tell that pupil exactly what lesson he or she should be attending at that precise moment. (The school is, in an in-joke, named after the famous English clockmaker Thomas Tompion).Stimpson is disliked by his pupils and staff, who see him as authoritarian and patronising, but he is evidently held in high regard by the wider teaching profession, because he has been elected Chairman of the prestigious Headmasters' Conference. The film tells the story of what occurs on the day on which Stimpson is due to address the annual meeting of the Conference in Norwich. Things start to go wrong when, due to his misunderstanding what he is told by a ticket-collector at the station, he finds himself on the wrong train and ends up missing the train he should have caught. Told that there will not be another train to Norwich for several hours, he decides to make the journey by road and returns home, only to find that his wife has taken the car. He meets Laura, one of his sixth-form pupils, and in desperation persuades her to drive him on the 163-mile journey to Norwich. A further chain of misunderstandings leads to them being pursued across the English countryside by the police, by Laura's parents (who suspect that their daughter is having an affair with her headmaster) and by his wife (who suspects the same thing). On the way they kidnap a former girlfriend of Stimpson's whom they meet by accident, drive the car into a field and get stuck, find themselves in a monastery and, in their desperation to get to Norwich on time, end up holding up a passing motorist in order to steal his clothes, his money and his car.The film's central joke is that a man who is so obsessed with punctuality should find himself running very late in his attempts to get to the most important meeting of his life. Although Stimpson is the sort of man that most people would automatically dislike if we were to meet him in real life, Cleese manages to arouse a certain sympathy for his character, whose sense of panic arises from a sense that he is the victim of circumstances, that the entire universe is united in a vast conspiracy to prevent him from fulfilling what should have been a relatively simple task. His desperation is increased by the remote possibility that he might just be able to get to Norwich on time. ("It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand). There can be few of us who have not had, at some time or other, a similar feeling.Although the film is sometimes described as a farce, that word should not be taken as implying that it is a purely mechanical comedy; character also plays an important part. Fortunately, Cleese is not only a very good technical comedian- his timing in this film is superb- but also a very good character actor. (A gift shared by another ex-Python, Michael Palin). Cleese also receives good support from the rest of the cast, particularly from Alison Steadman as his long-suffering wife Gwenda and Sharon Maiden as the wild and headstrong Laura, for whom driving her headmaster cross-country is a much more interesting way of spending her day than a few hours of boring lessons.The film is not quite in the same class as Palin's two great post-Python comedies, "The Missionary" and "A Private Function". For most of the time it is very funny indeed; for most of the first hour and a bit I was laughing out loud. (Remarkably, my wife was too- normally she loathes the Pythons and all their works). Unfortunately, the scriptwriter Michael Frayn was unable to maintain this sense of comic invention to the end. The story needed some dazzling twist to finish on, but instead it fizzles out rather tamely and the last quarter of an hour or so, after Stimpson finally arrives at the Conference, is rather disappointing after what has gone before. Nevertheless, this is still one of the better British comedies of the eighties; I certainly prefer it to the overrated "A Fish Called Wanda". 7/10