The protagonist and narrator is Dexter King, an American actor working in London and living platonically in Camden Town with his "educated, charming... nymphomaniac" landlady. He has just finished his sixth year playing "The Tall Guy", a straight man in a two-man, long-running comedy revue starring Ron Anderson. Chronic hay fever prompts him to see a doctor, where he meets and falls quickly in love with Kate, who works there as a nurse. Soon after meeting Kate, Dexter is fired by Ron. After being rejected for a role in a new Steven Berkoff play for "lacking anger", Dexter wins the title role in a new Royal Shakespeare Companymusical based on The Elephant Man. It's "a sparkily nasty send-up of Andrew Lloyd Webber" called Elephant! which features a song called "He’s Packing His Trunk" and a finale which ends with the lyric "Somewhere up in heaven there's an angel with big ears!" During rehearsal, Dexter succumbs to the advances of a married co-star. On the new musical's opening night, Kate puts together evidence of the affair from a few subtle clues, and leaves Dexter without further ado. After seeing a scene in a televised award show that suggests Ron is now dating Kate, Dexter impulsively gives up his role in Elephant! just before the curtain rises, with plans to make an impassioned plea to Kate to take him back. With Ron's involuntary help, Dexter presents his case to Kate in a busy hospital ward. Kate agrees to give him another chance.
occurred in 1988. Nearly twenty years later, Mel Smith, calling his directorial debut the high point of his career, commented on the directing experience: "I didn't know enough about the film business, and so it seemed wonderfully easy."
Critical reception
Upon its September 1990 US release, Entertainment Weekly gave it a "B-", describing it as "mildly charming and mostly too broad" and accusing it of overplaying "Dexter's dorkiness in the same way it overplays the big sex scene, the romantic montage, the breakup scene…" Caryn James of The New York Times wrote "even when its bright theatrical satire gives way to men dressed as nuns dancing in wimples and red sequined shorts, this modest comedy is always wickedly endearing, thanks to the off-kilter characters played by Mr. Goldblum and Emma Thompson as the unlikely woman of his dreams." Roger Ebert called the film a "sweet, whimsical and surprisingly intelligent comedy" whose "last third...turns into a hilarious sendup of the modern musical" that "must be the funniest deliberately bad play in a movie since Mel Brooks' "Springtime for Hitler" in The Producers." The Deseret News called it a "most uneven romantic comedy," saying "If you're a Monty Python fan, lower your expectations a notch. We're more in Benny Hill territory here....The highlights here are easily the staged "Elephant!" sequences, with some very funny sendups of the gargantuan musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber." In a 2003 mid-career retrospective about Richard Curtis, The Guardian described the film as being "patronised in one sense by critics while not patronised in the other by audiences.". It also identified several tropes from The Tall Guy that would be utilised in his subsequent romantic comedies, :
romantic lightning strikes that "Curtis seems to believe in as much as any figure in history apart from Cupid";
the "willingness to sacrifice realism to a gag" ;
the "wacky but wise" flatmate;
the use of eccentric obscenities.
Soundtrack
The score is by Peter Brewis. The soundtrack also includes Labi Siffre's "It Must Be Love", performed by Madness. The film features a montage in which various characters sing along to this song, and which includes a cameo by Madness frontman Suggs. Other tracks include "Let the Heartaches Begin", "Heartbreak Hotel", "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" and "Crying in the Rain".
