Fawlty Towers - A Touch of Class/The Builders/The Wedding Party/The Hotel Inspectors
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Actor: Andrew Sachs, Connie Booth, John Cleese, Prunella ScalesBrand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 170 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-10-16
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: BBC Warner
DVD Reviews of Fawlty Towers - A Touch of Class/The Builders/The Wedding Party/The Hotel Inspectors
DVD Review: Faulty towers
Summary: 4 Stars
John Cleese's "Fawlty Towers" is one of those universally funny TV shows, all about the undignified exploits of a perpetually hostile, repressed and tetchy hotel manager, and the more competant staff who try to keep thngs sane. This DVD contains the first three episodes, which starts off a little wobbly but quckly gains its comic footing.
In "A Touch of Class," Basil Fawlty (Cleese) puts out a snotty ad to attract a "better class of customer," which attracts a pleasant aristocrat. Basil fawns revoltingly over the man, neglecting the other guests. But savvy waittress Polly (Connie Booth) discovers that another guest is a cop -- and that Basil is in danger of handing his coins over to a con man.
"The Builders" are called in for Fawlty Towers, while Basil's wife Sybil (Prunella Scales) is away. But Basil has hired a cut-rate builder, and Manuel (Andrew Sachs) and his broken English are in command at the time. So when Basil arrives, he finds a disaster zone -- and he has only a matter of hours to repair it.
Finally, Basil's prudish sensibilities are offended when a couple stays at the hotel -- and they're not married. Even worse, an older couple shows up and seems to be engaging in hanky-panky with the younger ones -- and even Polly is in on the action. Now Basil is determined to keep it all clean and chaste -- as he dodges an amorous Frenchwoman.
The first few episodes are not quite up to the standards of later ones like "The Germans" and "The Kipper and the Corpse," with some comic timing that just feels a little off. But the first volume of "Fawlty Towers" is still very entertaining, and has lots of legendary comic moments like Basil throttling the gnome. (And no, that is not a wink-wink-nudge-nudge euphemism)
What is really noticeable about this series is that there is always a feeling of barely-restrained chaos, as if peace'n'quiet is an abnormality. The crazy humor tends towards naughtiness (a drunken Manuel embracing Basil in the hallway) and slapstic, while the dialogue is loaded down with witticisms ("She can kill a man at ten paces with one blow of her tongue!").
Basil is a prudish, eccentric, classist manager based on a nightmare hotelier that Cleese met during his "Monty Python" days, and Cleese is brilliant here. Scales is great as his acid-tongued, beehived wife, while Booth and Sachs are great as (respectively) the intelligent waittress and the hapless Spanish waiter who doesn't understand half of what people say, because "he's from Barcelona."
"Fawlty Towers" lacked total brilliance at the start, but by the third episode the series had evened out nicely. A great trio of episodes.
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Description of Fawlty Towers - A Touch of Class/The Builders/The Wedding Party/The Hotel Inspectors
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