Leonard Rossiter and Frances de la Tour carry this film, not without a struggle, as the script was obviously hurriedly cobbled together out of old episodes. When it came out, this must have been a real disappointment as it's also done on a bus ticket budget. Attempts to move it out of the house - which is jarringly unrecognisable, a bad job all round there - with a picnic, fantasy sequences, rugby and a boxing match in the local gym simply don't work. Most of these are just character-light setups for a solitary not-particularly good gag. That said, the interplay of Rossiter and de la Tour (and anybody else with him) is mostly hilarious; they even manage to make a soda syphon gag work, but you can see the struggle with recycling a literally uninspired script that changes plot half way through. Don Warrington has very little to do except 'be black', and due to the random script hacks Christopher Strauli changes character at least twice. And in the end, as he often did in the TV series (though you might not remember - read the scripts), Eric Chappell lets you down with a 'time's up' ending. Were they that cynical, or just too desperate to be in the film business? Rossiter and de la Tour are always funny but as a film, it's a terrible postscript to a fondly remembered TV series. RIP.
Review of Rising Damp
