Gentle Edwardian tale based on Mr Jerome K. Jerome's popular comic novel. A fifty year old product of a much gentler age that looks even older,"Three men in a boat"features the late messrs Tomlinson,Harvey and Edwards as three upper middle class chaps quietly exploring the posher reaches of the Thames.Some of the finest British character actors of the time happily perform to expectation,the colours are cosy and glowing and nobody believes for a minute that it has anything to do with real life - nor indeed should it have. Mr Jerome - clearly an Anglophile - wrote of England as he would wish it to be,picnic hampers,pet dogs,well-behaved children with Nannies and sailor suits,impeccably-mannered gentlemen and shy modest young ladies. It is his vision of Edwardian England that the movie reflects. It is comforting in it's predictability,satisfyingly droll in a not unpleasantly smug kind of way.These men and their contemporaries were soon enough to disappear from English life,falling in their thousands on the Somme and at Paschendale and Ypres.Let's not begrudge them their last long summer,bumbling harmlessly along the river,fingers trailing in the water,flirting mildly with the gels twirling their umbrellas on the bank.When they died out,something peculiarly English died out with them. The Gentleman with a capital "G".
Review of Three Men in a Boat
