Funny Bones (1995)

Director:

Peter Chelsom

Writers:

Peter Chelsom (writer)
Peter Flannery (writer)

Release Date:

31 March 1995 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama

Plot:

Tommy Fawkes wants to be a successful comedian but his Las Vegas debut is a failure. He goes back to Blackpool...

Plot Keywords:

Comedian | Blackpool | Egg | Magic Trick | Mortuary

Awards:

8 wins

Cast

Oliver Platt	...	Tommy Fawkes
Jerry Lewis	...	George Fawkes
Lee Evans	...	Jack Parker
Leslie Caron	...	Katie Parker
Richard Griffiths	...	Jim Minty
Sadie Corre	...	Poodle Woman
Oliver Reed	...	Dolly Hopkins
George Carl	...	Thomas Parker
Freddie Davies	...	Bruno Parker
Ian McNeice	...	Stanley Sharkey
Christopher Greet	...	Lawrence Berger
Peter Gunn	...	Nicky
Gavin Millar	...	Steve Campbell
William Hootkins	...	Al
Terence Rigby	...	Billy Man

MPAA:

Rated R for some language and a scene of tragic violence.

Runtime:

128 min

Country:

UK | USA

Language:

English

Colour:

Black and White | Colour

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

Iceland:12 | Canada:14A | Australia:M | Germany:12 (bw) | Spain:13 | Sweden:11 | UK:15 | USA:R | Singapore:PG

Filming Locations:

Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Blackpool, Lancashire, England, UK

Company:

Hollywood Pictures

Trivia:

Most of Oliver Reed's part was removed during editing.

Goofs:

Continuity: In the scene where Tommy Fawkes gets the Parker brothers to sign the contract for their act, there is continuity with the chair. The Parker's stand up and go to set up the scene to show Tommy Fawkes. From a high shot you see Tommy Fawkes stand up and turn his chair around, it then cuts to the front of Tommy, his chair is in its original position and he turns it around again to the position he did in the first high shot.

Quotes:

Stanley Sharkey: It's all getting very French. And I don't like it.

Movie Connections:

Featured in "Zomergasten: (#11.4)" (1998)

A seaside postcard from the depths of the human heart

Not really a comedy - more a surreal, sometimes weirdly comic piece about comedians, about families, about the awfulness of having a famous father, about genius, about the problem of what makes a comic funny, about the sublime sadness of failure. Lee Evans is absolutely haunting as the tortured comic genius, the natural comic who is so purely a comedian that he can barely communicate except in gags, yet who will never be allowed to perform in public because of his dark past. Leslie Caron is heart-rending as his mother, a brave, faded French beauty stranded for ever singing mildly risque songs in Blackpool pubs, and their tender scenes together are for me the best thing in the whole film.

The whole cast is incredible...right down to Oliver Reed camping it up gloriously in a bizarre sub-plot which at first I thought might be part of the Evans' character's fevered imagination. It is a movie absolutely crammed with magic but in one of my favourite scenes, Oliver Platt arrives in Blackpool and instantly sees it peopled with characters from Donald McGill postcards - fat ladies, saucy girls with flouncy skirts, burly men. The ending is a bit wonky and looks to my eye to have been changed from a tragic one to a "happy" one to please audiences. In the two opening sequences, both Evans and Platt utter the words "I'm going to die" in very different circumstances, and mean very different things, and other variations on the theme of death and laughter follow - all this seemed to be pointing down a much darker alleyway than the one we got. Doesn't matter, though. Still a great movie.