It's a year and a quarter since this caricatured, costumed spoof opened the 1997 Bradford Film Festival. Now, finally, the rest of Britain has the chance to judge it.

Stiff Upper Lips is the work of the British director Gary Sinyor, whose first film, Leon the Pig Farmer, surprised everyone by becoming, in relative terms, a big hit.

His latest feature has a broader agenda altogether, spanning two continents and serving up the sort of wide-ranging, scattershot satire in which Mel Brooks once specialised.

It bears more than a passing resemblance to Brooks's Blazing Saddles, burying the plot beneath a welter of sight gags and sacrificing any number of cinematic sacred cows on the altar of comedy.

Sinyor's targets here are those stuffy British costume dramas popularised by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, among others. Subtlety not being his strong suit, he has gone so far as to borrow the name Ivory for his central character.

The story opens in Cambridge in 1908, where the young and monied Emily Ivory (Georgina Cates) faces a dilemma: should she follow convention and marry within her class, or give her heart to the young peasant boy who saved her life and subsequently deflowered her?

"People like us are the scum of the earth and don't you forget it," reminds the lad's father (Brian Glover in one of his last performances).

Actually, the son (Sean Pertwee in Sean Bean mode) doesn't have much competition, as becomes clear when Emily's other suitor, the starched collared Cedric Trilling (Robert Portal), watches her fall in a lake and shouts for help in Latin.

Emily catches a chill, and a trip to Italy is prescribed - but her aunt (Prunella Scales) doesn't care much for the country. "I propose we go somewhere more English," she says, so off they head for India where they encounter Great Uncle Horace (Peter Ustinov), a tea plantation owner with a nice line in chat-ups.

"Your thighs are like strong young tea plants," he tells Prunella. "And your ankles like two lumps of sugar."

The performances are universally splendid. Ustinov especially is at his best (and that's pretty darn good) and the specific swipes at films such as Howards End and A Passage to India are well aimed if you spot the references; unintrusive if you don't.

Stiff Upper Lips has struggled mightily to find an audience. Originally scheduled for release a year ago, it finds itself competing now with a crop of cinema comedies of a more sophisticated nature altogether.

It remains to be seen whether, in this climate, a Merchant-Ivory spoof is quite what the public wants.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.