ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE MIDLANDS

Country: United Kingdom/Germany
Director: Shane Meadows
Lead Actors: Robert Carlyle, Rhys Ifans, Kathy Burke, Shirley Henderson
Running time: 104 min.
Rating: 14A (Coarse language, violence)

"Marvelously involving family saga." – Variety

A tinned spaghetti western

A sweet-natured contemporary love-triangle comedy that pays homage to the westerns of Sergio Leone. In Shane Meadows' third film, Rhys Ifans and Robert Carlyle go head-to-head over Shirley Henderson's shopkeeper. Only in a Shane Meadows film would a pair of Scots, a Scouser, a Cockney and a Welshman be found in the Wild West of Great Britain - otherwise known as the East Midlands, a land of bingo halls and shell suits. Considerably broader in its comic touch than Meadows' previous films, TWENTYFOURSEVEN and A ROOM FOR ROMEO BRASS, this film is undoubtedly a more overtly commercial vehicle, after his first and second features failed to find big audiences. Nevertheless, the film is still populated with the familiar working-class characters that we have come to associate with the director. As ever Meadows, again working from a script co-written with regular partner Paul Fraser, finds beauty in the everyday. The dialogue may be crude, but moments such as a shot of several aged couples waltzing around a bandstand show that the Uttoxeter-born lad has not lost his touch. The film opens with a daytime chat show, hosted by Vanessa Feltz. We are introduced to Shirley (Henderson) and her cowardly boyfriend Dek (Ifans), who has finally plucked up the courage to pop the question - live on air. Her refusal is watched on television by her former man, Jimmy (Carlyle), who soon finds himself involved in a bizarre heist in a cul-de-sac with two clowns and a bag of cash. Leaving his fellow criminals s to the cops, Jimmy hot-foots it to the Midlands, where his sister (Burke) and brother-in-law (Tomlinson) live, in the hope that he can lure Shirley away from Dek.

"It evokes the atmosphere of a Sergio Leone Western, sneaking up under the movie's human comedy and adding a smile. " - Chicago Sun-Times