Sherry Chandler

Tristram Shandy

One of the great joys of my graduate career was discovering Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne’s wonderful “unfinished” novel about a cock and a bull. Nearly made the two years I spent getting a master’s degree worth it.

Now Harry Rutherford at Heraclitan Fire tells us this wonderful rambling novel has been made into a movie that they’re showing at the London film festival. Said film is called “A Cock and Bull Story.”

I, of course, have not heard of it. I’m not a big film buff and the only London I’ve ever seen is in southern Kentucky. I tend to agree with him, though, about the cinematic quality of Tristram Shandy:

I can’t help thinking that, of all the early novelists, Sterne is the one who would have just loved making films. The book is full of great dialogue and slightly extraordinary characters, slapstick, set pieces, and technical innovation. The man who wrote a novel that includes a marbled page and those little squiggly lines to indicate the shape of his narrative would have loved playing with all the possibilities of film.

I can also understand his reservations about the cast:

Whether or not the new film does a good job of it is another matter. I’m slightly underwhelmed to see all the usual britcom suspects in the cast - Steve Coogan, David Walliams, Stephen Fry, Ronni Ancona, Rob Brydon - because it suggests a film being played for fairly broad comedy. And I’d almost always rather see an actor doing comedy than a comedian acting.

Stephen Fry is the only name here that I’m really familiar with and that primarily from the Jeeves and Wooster series that showed over here on Masterpiece Theater. Now if they had Hugh Laurie in the cast…

Possibly related posts:

Brave Warrior

A Thief of Time

SIDESHOW

Stephen Fry

Shakespeare Behind Bars

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