Welcome to Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm Glen Holland.

Tonight's film is the 1988 comedy, A Fish Called Wanda.

The film stars John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Klein, and Michael Palin.

The story was created by Cleese and the films director, Charles Crichton, who also directed two classic British comedies for Ealing Studios, The Lavender Hill Mob, with Alec Guinness in 1951 and The Titfield Thunderbolt in 1953.

As A Fish Called Wanda begins, a London gangster, George Thomason and his hapless, animal loving henchman, Ken Pile, recruit George's seductive American girlfriend, Wanda Gerschwitz, and her trigger happy brother, Otto, to help pull off a diamond heist.

The plan is to steal the diamonds, split the proceeds, and leave the country.

But Wanda and Otto are actually not sister and brother, but lovers, and after the successful heist, they anonymously tip off the police that George is responsible.

With George in prison, they are free to take the diamonds for themselves, but they soon discover George has hidden the loot.

Wanda sets out to seduce George's straight laced attorney, Archie Leach, to find out where the diamonds are.

Meanwhile, Ken Pile plans to kill an old lady, whose testimony can convict George, and the unstable Otto is seized by fits of violent jealousy every time Wanda attempts to use her feminine charms to worm George's secret out of his beguiled attorney.

A Fish Called Wanda is what is commonly known as a heist film.

A heist film shows a group of criminals planning and carrying out a particularly daring and skillful theft.

Earlier films of this type usually ended with the criminals ultimately failing for some reason.

This was because most studios and filmmakers followed the guidelines of the motion picture production code between 1934 and 1968.

The production code was intended to assure that motion pictures, and the people who made them, represented the proper moral standards and would not corrupt the members of their audiences through the portrayal of criminal or sexual activity.

If a film showed a criminal breaking the law, that person also had to be shown being caught and punished at least by implication.

Notable examples of heist dramas made under the production code include John Houston's The Asphalt Jungle in 1950 and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing in 1956.

But the same era also saw host of heist comedies such as Charles Creighton's own The Lavender Hill Mob in 1951, Big Deal on Madonna Street, an Italian comedy from 1958, the original Rat Pack version of Ocean's 11 in 1960, and Jules Dassin's Topkapi in 1964.

After the end of the production code, the crimes in most heist films were successful.

Such films as Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs in 1992 or Brian Singers neo-noir The Usual Suspects in 1995 focused more on the aftermath of the heist as the criminals involved double cross each other or otherwise bring about their own destruction.

Similarly, recent heist comedies are likely to focus on the personalities of the criminals involved and their interactions before and after the heist.

George Roy Hill's The Sting, released in 1973, gives equal attention to the planning and execution of the plan, and the interactions among the various plotters.

This apparent transparency led the audience to feel they were in on every aspect of the scheme until the film's final series of plot twists.

A Fish Called Wanda's screenwriter and star, John Cleese, and his co-star Michael Palin, two of the four main characters, were both alumni of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

This surreal, British sketch comedy program ran for 45 episodes on the BBC between 1969 and 1974, and also ran on many PBS stations in the United States for years afterwards.

Monty Python's Flying Circus tended to present odd characters in bizarre situations, with an emphasis on outrageous behavior and a casual attitude towards violence and cruelty.

In a 2015 interview, John Cleese summed up his general philosophy of life.

"I can take almost nothing seriously."

Mix Cleese's attorney and his ability to swing from stuffy to passionate in a matter of moments, with Palin's frustrated, fuming animal lover, add Jamie Lee Curtis's ruthless femme fatale, and Kevin Klein's violent Nietzsche-quoting knucklehead, and you have the recipe for a comedy heist of the highest quality.

The germ of the idea for A Fish Called Wanda came in 1983 in discussions between John Cleese and director Charles Crichton.

Cleese's original thought was to have a character with a stutter who would have to impart important information to another character at some point.

Crichton, on the other hand, really wanted to see someone get run over by a steamroller.

As it happened, Michael Palin's father stuttered and Palin drew on this experience when playing Ken Pile.

For example, Ken's stutter is less pronounced when he is around people he's comfortable with, like George Thomason and Wanda Gerschwitz, and much worse around people who make him nervous, like the volatile Otto West.

Cleese has said he based the character of Otto on an ad featuring a man who pretended to be wise, while looking "singularly unimpressive", as Cleese put it.

He made Otto a man not smart enough to realize how stupid he was.

Kevin Klein adlibbed a lot of his lines as he worked out what sort of person Otto was meant to be.

Ultimately, Klein won an Academy Award for best supporting actor without winning any previous awards for the role.

An unusual accomplishment for an Oscar winner.

Klein also begged Cleese to let Otto speak French, rather than Italian, when he wants to seduce Wanda, since Klein could actually speak French.

Cleese refused, insisting on Italian.

As a result, Klein had to ad lib much of his Italian dialogue, including common Italian phrases and the names of various cheeses.

Finally, he resorted to singing Volare, even though the producers didn't have the rights to use the song when the singing was filmed.

When the film was dubbed into Italian, the language used to seduce Wanda was changed to Spanish.

John Cleese wrote the role of Wanda with Jamie Lee Curtis in mind.

He had seen her play a prostitute in the 1983 comedy Trading Places, and thought she would bring the role the proper mix of sexiness, duplicity, and humor.

In some ways, the film is about Wanda's change of heart, after becoming involved with Archie.

From the beginning, it's clear that she's willing to betray, not only George and Ken, but her lover Otto as well.

In the course of the film, she kisses all of the lead male characters, but there is something about Archie besides his command of Italian and Russian, that wins her over and, as they say, makes an honest woman of her.

Curtis was identified as Jamie Lee Schwartz on all of the films call sheets because John Cleese found it amusing that her father, Tony Curtis's, real name was Bernard Schwartz.

Cleese plays an attorney in the film and he had himself entered the University of Cambridge as a student in law, although he never pursued law as a career.

He named his character Archie Leach because that was Cary Grants real name.

Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare in Somerset about 20 miles away from Grant's birthplace in Horfield, Bristol.

Cleese felt this was the closest he would ever come to being Cary Grant.

When A Fish Called Wanda was first shown to preview audiences, they were upset by what was then a messier version of the deaths of poor Mrs. Cody's dogs.

The scenes were then re-shot with a more obvious straw dog.

Cleese later said that he purposely chose a very small breed of dog for the scenes because he believed people didn't think of such breeds as real dogs, and so would be more likely to laugh when awful things happen to them.

By the way, the boys choir at each of the dog's funerals sing in Latin, "miserere dominus, miserere dominus, canis mortuus est", which translates as, "Have mercy, Lord, have mercy, Lord, the dog is dead."

Another somewhat macabre note: When A Fish Called Wanda was first shown in theaters in Denmark in 1983, a man named Olid Benson literally died laughing while watching the scene when Otto tortures Ken Pile by pushing french fries up his nose.

Apparently the scene reminded Benson of something that had once happened at a family dinner and his heart rate sped up so much that he suffered a cardiac arrest.

Cleese briefly considered referring to the incident publicity for the film, but fortunately, and uncharacteristically decided against it.

Finally, a bit of information for your next trivia quiz: A Fish Called Wanda was one of two films released in 1988 to show the villain being run over by a steamroller and surviving.

The other was Robert Zemeckis' Tune Town classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm Glen Holland.

Goodnight.