1969 British film
Otley is a 1968 British comedy thriller film, starring Tom Courtenay and Romy Schneider.[1] It was adapted by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais from a book by Martin Waddell, and released by Columbia Pictures.[2]
Plot
Tom Courtenay plays Gerald Arthur "Gerry" Otley, a charming but feckless young drifter who scrapes a living from selling antiques in trendy 1960s London. Gerry's responsibility-free life suddenly takes a serious turn, when he finds himself caught up in a round of murder, espionage and quadruple crossing. He is mistaken for a spy; is kidnapped and detained several times; and becomes romantically involved with a foreign agent (Romy Schneider) working for British Intelligence.
Production
The exterior action takes place in a number of recognisable London locations: the area around Portobello Road street market in Notting Hill; a houseboat colony near Cheyne Walk in Chelsea; Bowater House in Knightsbridge; the Playboy Club in Park Lane; and the old Unilever milk depot in Wood Lane. A wide range of period British vehicles is featured: Otley drives an E-Type Jaguar, a Ford Anglia and an early 1960s passenger coach, and his disastrous driving test, which turns into an epic car chase, involves a driving-school Vauxhall Viva and a Ford Zephyr.
The film, whose interiors were shot at Shepperton Studios, marked the directorial debut of Dick Clement. He and Ian La Frenais, famous at the time for writing The Likely Lads, wrote the script.[citation needed]
Don Partridge co-wrote and performed the title music, "Homeless Bones", which was also released as the B-side of his single "Colour My World" (1969).[3]
Awards
The film in 1970 won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award as Best British Comedy Screenplay.[4]
Reception
Critics were divided about the merits of Otley. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "Like Otley, the movie is a bad risk. Everything in it is borrowed and badly used—actors (Tom Courtenay, Alan Badel), situations (the triumph of the fraudulent fool) and even settings, including a rather handsome Thames houseboat that reminded me wistfully of The Horse's Mouth. Otley is the kind of movie that allows you to think about other movies, in those great gaps of time between the setting up of a gag and the moment when it is ritualistically executed."[5] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune wrote that the film was so boring it "could put Sominex out of business"[6] and admitted to walking out on it, reporting, "I took the CTA to see Otley at the Coronet theater in Evanston. The film began at 6:15 p. m. I returned home on the 7 p. m. train."[7] Variety wrote that "the film has an uneasy lack of a point of view and fails to focus viewer's attention on any particular character or plotline philosophy. The frantic, intentionally incoherent episodes are sometimes amusing, but too often suffer from unoriginality."[8] On the other side of the ledger, Judith Crist described it as "a bright, breezy, light-handed but never lightheaded spies-and-counterspies story".[9] Jack Ibberson of The Monthly Film Bulletin was also positive, calling it a "vastly entertaining comedy-thriller" with "uniformly excellent" performances.[10] In his book Sixties British Cinema, Robert Murphy wrote, "The only British spy film which succeeds both as a comedy and a thriller is Dick Clement and Ian LaFrenais's Otley."[11]
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