A Richard Curtis comedy. Possibly the funniest film you’ve never seen or heard of. Even the sex scene is funny.
I started reading IMDb almost 30 years ago. IMDb.com went live two months after Uncle Scoopy’s Fun House, so I feel like we grew up together. In the first two or three years of IMDb.com, Groundhog Day had an outrageously low rating, somewhere in the 5s. I expressed my shock over this in an IMDb comment in October of 1998. (I don’t remember when their comment system went live, but I remember that I was one of the first to comment on the movie.) It seemed at the time that the supporters of the film consisted solely of me, a couple of other commenters, and BAFTA, which gave it a deserved nomination as the best original screenplay of that year. The IMDb readers eventually came to their senses, and the film is now on the site’s “Top 250” list, making it one of the highest-rated comedies in history.
Which brings me to The Tall Guy, another film that prompted me to express shock and outrage over the low rating. This one has only recovered to 6.2, but it would be up there with Groundhog Day if I were doing the ratings. This movie is one funny mofo, written by the same guy who wrote Blackadder, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones’s Diary.
This is the rare movie which is both very intelligent and very funny, like the best work of Woody Allen or Steve Martin, but it is edgier, more stinging, and just generally bitchier than either Steve or Woody. Jeff Goldblum is the tall Woody Allen of the film, playing an American actor stuck in a dead-end stage job in London, as the anonymous sidekick who gets bopped over the head by an acclaimed baggy-pants slapstick comedian, played to perfection by that ubiquitous presence in all British comedies, Rowan Atkinson. Although Rowan is all smarmy, rubber-faced charm on stage, and is a Fawltyesque suck-up to the Royal Family, he is in fact a petty person who despises anyone who gets a bigger laugh than he.
After six years of playing Rowan’s stooge in baggy pants revues, Goldblum gets sacked, leaving him with very few opportunities. He goes to his agent, and the conversation goes something like this:
Agent: You have to take what you can get. You have been out of circulation for six years, and 73% of all actors are unemployed.
Goldblum: And yet Roger Moore works.
Agent: The universe is mysterious.
That conversation led him to the lead role in a musical comedy based upon The Elephant Man, called (appropriately enough) “Elephant!” This show-within-the-film is hilarious. The author is obviously not a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber, because he has managed to take all of Webber’s musical and stylistic excesses and combine them into a tasteless new pastiche. The songs really sound like they are right out of a Webber musical, but the words are blackly comedic. When the Elephant Man dies, heaven welcomes an “angel with big ears”.
Here is how the New York Times described it:
Andrew Lloyd Webber himself has never matched it, and only Mel Brooks’s classic ”Springtime for Hitler” in ”The Producers” is more inspired. A musical version of ”The Elephant Man” comes complete with a chorus line of men in suits wearing elephant masks, tap-dancing and kicking up their heavy gray hoofs with the precision of the Rockettes, finally raising their trunks in unison.
At its heart, when it’s not goofing on theater cliches, this movie is a simple romantic comedy about a relationship between the tall guy and an ostensibly prim nurse (Emma Thompson, brilliant as always) who is hiding a volcanic sexual appetite beneath her starched whites. The film handles that with aplomb as well. The sex scene between Goldblum and Thompson is excellent, and laugh-out-loud funny – a parody of all of those movie scenes where the couple is swept away by passion. At one point they have all four feet on a piano keyboard, and are playing chords as they frolic. After they finish, their room looks a hotel room in war-torn Gaza after a weekend stay by Kid Rock.
The film is filled with obscure and fun references, like an episode of the Simpsons or a Dennis Miller rant. In fact, the London song which opens “Elephant” is very similar to the Simpsons’ famous New Orleans song in their musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire. (This movie came first, if you are wondering)
Some of my favorite lines in the movie were complete throwaways. Goldblum at one point is watching an award show, rooting for anyone to beat Atkinson. One of the other nominees for “best comedic actor” was Christopher Reeve in “Whoops, Hamlet.” Another was Dudley Moore in that comedic masterpiece, Death of a Salesman.
I laughed out loud through most of the film. Your mileage may vary because the film is full of “inside baseball” references to films and plays, and you may not love that as much as I do, but whether you do or not, dammit, this movie is just too good to be so obscure.
I can go you one better on IMDb. I was around when Col Needham first started it as database in the Usenet newgroup called rec.arts.movies. This was pre-World Wide Web, and only available on the newsgroup (which was a petty big one for its time). IIRC, you mailed simple formatted text files with the move title and your rating to a collector on Col’s server, and it would do the tabulations.
I wasn’t aware of it in my USENET days, but I have read that it dates back to 1990.
I never saw it at the time, but it sounds like my sort of movie. And Ms. Thompson nude is a definite plus. I will be putting this in our film queue. My wife is a big Jeff Goldblum fan, so she will get some eye candy too.
Whenever I hear about a movie I might want to watch that isn’t currently in theaters, I have specific places I look to see if it is available. I started with the Just Watch website, which told me The Tall Guy (1989) is not available to stream anywhere. Next, I searched for The Tall Guy (1989) on Amazon. The first listings was for The Tall Men (1955) on Prime Video, followed by a listing for The Tall Guy (1989) on a PAL VHS tape that was currently unavailable. This was followed by listings for all of the different Walking Tall films, The Bird Cage, and Road House. Of course, when I added DVD to the search, the first 4 results were for The Fall Guy (2024) on DVD, then Road House (1989), Steven Bernstein – Solos: The Jazz Sessions, and Solos: The Jazz Sessions – Lee Konitz, all on Prime Video.
Isn’t it amazing how searching on Amazon so often helps you find exactly what you’re not looking for?
When I removed the year and just searched for “The Tall Guy DVD,” the 3rd, 4th, and 5th results were actually for The Tall Guy on DVD. Success!!! Those DVDs could be mine for the low, low prices of $79, $79, and $153.66.
Those prices are reminiscent of what some movies used to cost in the late eighties. They called it “priced for rental” because if they didn’t think a lot of people would want to own the VHS tape, the studios wanted to get as much money from the video stores as possible. I wonder if the original VHS release cost more or less than $79? So, if we want to take Scoppy’s advice and watch the Tall Guy, our choices are to pay $79 for the DVD (BTW, the $79 listings both say “Only 1 left in stock.”) or raise the Jolly Roger and sail over to the Pirate Bay? Not exactly.
The entire film is available to watch on YouTube.
Yeah, I could not find a place to officially stream it either and any DVD copies available to purchase online were ridiculously expensive. We still have a video rental store in the neighbourhood that has somehow managed to survive the streaming era, likely because they have a vast catalogue of films often not available elsewhere. I checked their catalogue and they have it. Thanks very much for the YouTube link, but I assume that is an unofficial pirate, so I am going to rent from our local store to show them some love.
The best way to see hard to find stuff is YouTube now that studios don’t seem to care about most older movies
You would think that every movie and TV show should be available, at the very least, as a streaming rental. Films don’t earn any money locked away in studio vaults. I am not sure what studio owns this film (that might be part of the problem), but it was released on DVD by Buena Vista Home Entertainment, a.k.a the House of Mouse. The reason many older movies and TV shows are not available to stream legally is because the studios think tracking down and getting all the necessary contract releases signed would cost more money than these movies and shows would earn. YouTube is sort of a legal gray area. I highly doubt “Nozin’ Aroun'” was legally authorized to upload this film, but YouTube is not legally required to pull the movie down unless the rights holder asks them to. If and when the entity that owns The Tall Guy is made aware that the film has been uploaded to YouTube without their permission, they can do one of three things. First, they can tell YouTube to take it down. Second, they can do nothing. Third, they can tell YouTube that the movie was uploaded without their permission and have YouTube start paying them the uploader’s share of the money the film earns through YouTube’s AdSense. If the producer of The Tall Guy doesn’t have all the required contract releases to make The Tall Guy available to a streaming service, they might just decide to claim the AdSense money. Who knows? Maybe Nozin’ Aroun is one of the film’s producers.
By all means, Chinney should patronize his local video store, but I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with watching the film on YouTube if the film’s owner hasn’t provided any other method to watch it. Regardless, watching a movie on YouTube is perfectly legal.
Man, this must be Usenet groups memorial day. Usenet still exists, and The Tall Guy is available for download from it. I’m won’t post any more details unless Scoop says he’s okay with it, but how-to is easily Googleable. The only catch is you have to have access to Usenet, which these days has a (small) cost. But for most of you, the YouTube version linked by Michael McChesney will probably suffice.
I was working at an independent video store when this one was released on VHS. It was one of my go to recommendations for people. It really is a great film, and it had kind of slipped my mind – definitely going to rewatch it today.
Is it just me or is your image host (imgbox.com) down? All I get with all your links this morning is “502 Bad Gateway” message. Very frustrating to say the least, especially since I recall Emma Thompson looking quite nice in her birthday suit.
Is this film the only significant nudity for Miss Thompson? If not, where else can one see her nekkid?
Re: imgbox. I think we just have to wait it out!
Emma’s other nude scenes have been mostly Serious Art like Carrington or Wit (playing a cancer patient), she did have a nice MILF full frontal in Here’s to You Leo Grande a few yrs ago & I do remember a paparazzi of her totally nude on a beach, nice bum!
She has some degree of nudeity in;
The Tall Guy (1989)
Carrington (1995)
The Winter Guest (1997)
Wit (2001)
Imagining Argentina (2003)
Angels in America (2003)
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022)
PR
Glad to see you give this film some PR. It’s one of my favorites, too, and I’m always recommending it to people who’ve never seen it, which is unfortunately just about everybody.
The sex scene in Dolemite Is My Name was pretty funny too
If you like the quirky, smart humor of The Tall Guy, then let me suggest to all two other Goldblum movies he made during this phase of his career — The Favor, the Watch, and the Very Big Fish; and Mr Frost. The first is another romantic comedy and the second is psychological horror, sorta. Not a lot of nudity in either (or any IIRC) but still good and odd movies.
I finally got around to watching The Tall Guy with my wife this past weekend. Enjoyable. It is, admittedly, very much in the ‘light entertainment’ category of film, but it was fun throughout and with quite a number of laugh-out-loud scenes. Granted, at times the lightness of the material strays into outright silliness. The script did not take itself seriously and that was reflected in the performances by Emma Thompson, Jeff Goldblum and the rest of the cast: they appeared to be having a very good time, but were not entirely believable in their roles. Still, I think that it worked well as comedy and as entertainment. This was Richard Curtis’ first movie script and you can see in the film the beginnings of the style that would later mature into his hits in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Love Actually, etc.
Thanks to Scoop and others here for the recommendation.
One other comment, picking up on the discussion earlier. The video rental store here that I mentioned that somehow has survived into this streaming era – and where indeed I did get the copy of The Tall Guy that we watched – is soon to be no more. I talked to the owner when renting the film and he plans to wind things up by the end of June. He says that business remained good even into the pandemic and slightly beyond, but has really tailed off over the past couple of years. And he is ready for retirement. Sad, because as I said, the store has a vast catalogue of films including those not easily found online, if at all.