We needed this movie. An important subject... Macintosh was confusing as a character... The wife would of been hard to portray as she was a very strong woman and that was almost understated. Muggeridge was also confusing as was his flitting around Vichy France so easily. A bit more story is needed on this and how they ended up in Bellport NY the home of publishers and near Willie Hitler and his Wife's residence walking distance down the road. I hope there will be a second movie to show who they were along with their friendships with E. B. White and family. Also something about their lives in Remsenberg NY. So many characters surrounding them in the States leaves me wondering why they lived in France or maybe that the US and UK had made the plans for him to do his writings in France. So much of the story seems to be trying to make us believe something that may not at all be so simple leaving for motivations in the movie that are not believable. I hope more comes to light on Wodehouse and Wife before I depart.
9 Reviews
Simple and sad
ekelks-21 November 2016
Hugely disagree with the one other reviewer on this site. That Wodehouse was too innocent to understand how the Nazis were using him also explains why he didn't blink an eye at Macintosh's anti-Semitic doings. Wodehouse was sequestered from the war by the Nazis. How was he to know what was happening? Absurd critique. And the movie is paced well, not too fast, certainly not too slow. Pigott-Smith is wonderful as Wodehouse, Zoe Wanamaker brilliant as his beloved, not-so-easily fooled wife. Julian Rhind-Tutt plays Malcolm Muggeridge, PUNCH editor, satirist, and Guardian writer. Flora Montgomery, once Ireland's EFP's Shooting Star, is lovely as Leonora, Wodehouse's (step)-daughter.
Fantastic acting
alzomo-5867418 September 2021
One of the best movies I have seen in a long time. What others have criticized as "cardboard, cartoonish and lifeless," I find as being consistent with characters being presented. An innocent man/child in a bewilderingly serious world he is not part of and can only marginally relate to.
Whether this characterization is accurate to the real man is almost irrelevant. The world is a dark place and the only way he can relate to it is by jokes and the only way he can cope is by describing its absurdities.
Whether this characterization is accurate to the real man is almost irrelevant. The world is a dark place and the only way he can relate to it is by jokes and the only way he can cope is by describing its absurdities.
No not boring.
spidargirl21 January 2022
We are old enough to remember Malcolm Muggeridge and were amazed to see his part in this film based on fact. You need to Google him and Wodehouse to find background to the film if your under 75 and know nothing about P. G.
Great acting by all involved.
Mrs Wodehouse ( Zoe Wanamaker) had some wonderful costumes Where did she get the coupons?
Another thing to Google if you haven't heard how they contributed to the war effort.
Mrs Wodehouse ( Zoe Wanamaker) had some wonderful costumes Where did she get the coupons?
Another thing to Google if you haven't heard how they contributed to the war effort.
PG Wodehouse an Innocent Unwitting Pawn
blpkst15 September 2021
Warning: Spoilers
As a person who enjoys Masterpiece Theater productions, I saw this film highlighted on Prime and decided to watch it. I knew little about PG Wodehouse, only that he wrote a popular character called Jeeves who is a butler and a rather scornful butler at that. Wodehouse appears to have been a very nice man who was wrongly accused of aiding the enemy during WWII. Specifically the Germans and not by being a spy but by unwittingly agreeing to do radio broadcasts to let his American public know that he has escaped harm after being released from a German civilian internment camp. The subsequent radio broadcasts are misunderstood by the British and are seen unfavorably bordering on treason. The film is well cast and the characters fleshed out. It is a beautiful portrait of the author who only realizes that he has been used once his wife has reunited with him in Berlin and she explains it to him in no uncertain terms. This quiet film is truly enjoyable even though it is a story tinged with sadness and regret.
Fine cast, intriguing subject... but lifeless
210west9 April 2021
Warning: Spoilers
If you know the fundamentals of the controversy - Wodehouse's naively well-meant wartime radio broadcasts while in German captivity and the fury they aroused among some in Britain, so staining his reputation that he never returned there - this film will tell you nothing new, and will merely confirm your assumptions: "Plum" childlike, unworldly, escaping into his fiction; wife Ethel feisty, sexy, cannier; Malcolm Muggeridge stalwart and decent; stepdaughter Leonora loyal and devoted; conniving Nazis, etc. They are all just cardboard.
A critic described the cast of the recent Godzilla/Kong movie as not so much characters as "Exposition Delivery Units," and that wonderful phrase - or sometimes its corollary, Message Delivery Units - occurred to me when a British official (supposedly Alfred Duff Cooper, but it could have been anyone) launched into an angry speech to a subordinate, something on the order of "Don't you understand, Wodehouse's broadcasts to the Americans are undermining the war effort, we British are in grave trouble, our shipping is down XX percent to the Nazis and if we don't bring the Americans in, we'll lose the bloody war," etc. At another point, Wodehouse's stepdaughter - who has only a dozen or so lines in the entire movie, every one of them strictly functional and by-the-numbers - actually declares, out of the blue, "I wish I wasn't going into a hospital," and her fond husband - who has even fewer lines - actually replies, "Darling, it isn't a serious operation." (Of course she dies. How could she not? And incidentally, when Plum and her mother learn of her death, their shock and grief are so tepid and unconvincing that the scene is downright embarrassing.)
More exposition: Wodehouse is described - and I assume this is speaking for the screenwriter - as "a kind of saint," and toward the end, in case we needed things to be made even clearer, Muggeridge intones, "He isn't equipped for this nasty little century...its lies and cruelties and distortions." (To show his anger at one point, Muggeridge proceeds to overturn a table in a Paris hotel restaurant.) We also have a scene where the stepdaughter speaks long-distance to Wodehouse's American agent while, in a convenient comic-book touch, a Blitz bombing is actually going on. In a later scene, this stepdaughter, hearing Wodehouse attacked on the BBC, begins answering back to the radio, drowning it out before she's even heard more than a few sentences - and then she angrily switches it off! That's not how someone behaves when they hear something shocking and unexpected over the radio; they listen, appalled, to every word.
The movie is very pretty to look at, with beautiful period decor, but its small cast and limited story line made me think that it might actually have worked better as a simple stage play, with a few bridge chairs on a bare stage, where the dialogue might not have seemed quite so contrived and artificial. But even then, we still wouldn't leave knowing anything more, or understanding anything more, than we did when we came in.
A critic described the cast of the recent Godzilla/Kong movie as not so much characters as "Exposition Delivery Units," and that wonderful phrase - or sometimes its corollary, Message Delivery Units - occurred to me when a British official (supposedly Alfred Duff Cooper, but it could have been anyone) launched into an angry speech to a subordinate, something on the order of "Don't you understand, Wodehouse's broadcasts to the Americans are undermining the war effort, we British are in grave trouble, our shipping is down XX percent to the Nazis and if we don't bring the Americans in, we'll lose the bloody war," etc. At another point, Wodehouse's stepdaughter - who has only a dozen or so lines in the entire movie, every one of them strictly functional and by-the-numbers - actually declares, out of the blue, "I wish I wasn't going into a hospital," and her fond husband - who has even fewer lines - actually replies, "Darling, it isn't a serious operation." (Of course she dies. How could she not? And incidentally, when Plum and her mother learn of her death, their shock and grief are so tepid and unconvincing that the scene is downright embarrassing.)
More exposition: Wodehouse is described - and I assume this is speaking for the screenwriter - as "a kind of saint," and toward the end, in case we needed things to be made even clearer, Muggeridge intones, "He isn't equipped for this nasty little century...its lies and cruelties and distortions." (To show his anger at one point, Muggeridge proceeds to overturn a table in a Paris hotel restaurant.) We also have a scene where the stepdaughter speaks long-distance to Wodehouse's American agent while, in a convenient comic-book touch, a Blitz bombing is actually going on. In a later scene, this stepdaughter, hearing Wodehouse attacked on the BBC, begins answering back to the radio, drowning it out before she's even heard more than a few sentences - and then she angrily switches it off! That's not how someone behaves when they hear something shocking and unexpected over the radio; they listen, appalled, to every word.
The movie is very pretty to look at, with beautiful period decor, but its small cast and limited story line made me think that it might actually have worked better as a simple stage play, with a few bridge chairs on a bare stage, where the dialogue might not have seemed quite so contrived and artificial. But even then, we still wouldn't leave knowing anything more, or understanding anything more, than we did when we came in.
What a waste
susansundaisy28 August 2021
Very dull movie
newjersian16 June 2016
Warning: Spoilers
The move is, would I say, a very average work of an amateurish film maker. Everything is done straight, like in a court record. And the movie is saved only by the brilliant performance of Tim Pigott-Smith. One scene is very puzzling to me. There was a joke in the former Soviet Union. Two Russians keep a conversation. One says: "We have to kill all the Jews and the hair cutters." The other guy thinks a bit and answers with amusement: "But why the hair cutters?" About the same line is used in this movie. The British security officer tells Wodehouse that his companion, Mackintosh, was a collaborator. The officer continues: "Mackintosh translated to English the texts of the German marches and some anti-Semitic books." Wodehouse, like the Russian guy from the Soviet joke, asks with amusement: "German marches?" That line says a lot about the British state of mind and the quality of this movie.
Plodding
madfashionista6 December 2021
This is an excellent class trying vainly to work with material that's almost a parody. Exposition dumps aplenty. Plus, Wodehouse was definitely cloistered but not as unworldly as this movie portrays him. He was anti-Semitic and aware of the businesses of theater and publishing. However all Wodehouse did for most of his life was sequester himself and write. I enjoyed Wodehouse reading his work to his fellow prisoners.
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