The Full Monty

The Full Monty is a 1997 British comedy film directed by Peter Cattaneo, starring Robert Carlyle, Mark Addy, William Snape, Steve Huison, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Barber and Hugo Speer. The screenplay was written by Simon Beaufoy. The film is set in Sheffield, England during the 1980s, and tells the story of six unemployed men, four of them former steel workers, who decide to form a male striptease act (à la Chippendale dancers) in order to make some money and for the main character, Gaz, to be able to see his son. Gaz declares that their show will be much better than the renowned Chippendales dancers because they will go "the full monty"—strip all the way—hence the film's title.

For other uses, see The Full Monty (disambiguation).

The Full Monty
UK theatrical release poster
Directed byPeter Cattaneo
Produced byUberto Pasolini
Written bySimon Beaufoy
Starring
Music byAnne Dudley
CinematographyJohn de Borman
Edited byDavid Freeman
Nick Moore
Production
company
Redwave Films
Channel Four Films
Distributed byFox Searchlight Pictures
Release date
  • 15 August 1997 (1997-08-15) (United States)[1]
  • 29 August 1997 (1997-08-29) (United Kingdom)
Running time
91 minutes[2]
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Budget$3.5 million[1]
Box office$258 million[1]

Despite being a comedy, the film also touches on serious subjects such as unemployment, fathers' rights, depression, impotence, homosexuality, body image, working class culture and suicide. The Full Monty was a major critical success upon release and an international commercial success, grossing over $250 million from a budget of only $3.5 million. It was the highest-grossing film in the UK until it was outsold by Titanic. It won the BAFTA Award for Best Film, and was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Musical or Comedy Score, winning the last.

The British Film Institute ranked The Full Monty the 25th best British film of the 20th century. The film was later adapted into the 2000 musical The Full Monty, and the 2013 play The Full Monty.

Plot

It is the mid 1980s. The once-successful steel mills of Sheffield, South Yorkshire have shut down and most of the staff have all been made redundant. Former steelworkers Gary "Gaz" Schofield and Dave Horsefall have resorted to stealing scrap metal from the abandoned mills to sell in order to make some cash. They take Gaz’s son Nathan with them to help their thieving efforts. They are surprised by a security guard who locks them inside the steel mill.

Gaz is facing trouble from his former wife Mandy and her boyfriend Barry over child support payments that he has been unable to pay since losing his job. Nathan lives with Mandy and Barry but Gaz has joint custody of him with Mandy. Nathan wishes he and his father Gaz could do more "normal stuff" in their time together. Mandy is seeking a court ruling giving her sole custody of Nathan, whom Gaz loves dearly. Gaz is desperate for money and for Nathan’s love.

One day, Gaz spots a crowd of women lined up outside a local club to see a Chippendales' striptease act. He gets the idea to form his own striptease group using local men in the hope of making enough money to pay off his child support obligations. The first to join the group is Lomper, a security guard at the steel mill where Dave and Gaz once worked, whom they interrupt while he is attempting suicide. Next, they recruit Gerald Cooper, their former foreman, who is hiding from his wife the fact that he is now unemployed. Gaz and Dave see Gerald and his wife, Linda, at a dance class, and recruit him to teach them some actual dance moves.

Looking for more recruits, the four men hold an open audition and settle on Horse, an older man who is nevertheless a good dancer, and Guy, who can't dance at all but proves to be unusually well-endowed. The six men begin to practise their act. Gaz then learns that he has to pay a £100 deposit in order to secure the club for the night. He cannot afford this, but Nathan gets the money out of his savings. When they are greeted by two local women while they put up posters for the show, Gaz boasts that they are better than the real Chippendales because they go "the full monty". Dave drops out due to his body image problems and finds a job as a security guard at Asda. The others hold a public rehearsal at the mill in front of some female relatives of Horse, but are caught mid-show by a passing policeman, and Gaz, Gerald and Horse are arrested for indecent exposure. This costs Gaz the right to see Nathan. Lomper and Guy manage to escape to Lomper's house, where they look lovingly at each other, starting a relationship.

Gerald is thrown out by Linda after bailiffs arrive at their house and seize their belongings to pay Gerald's debts, resulting in him having to stay with Gaz. Later Gaz goes to Asda and asks Dave if he could borrow a jacket for Lomper's mother's funeral. Dave agrees and also decides to quit his job and they go to the funeral together.

Soon, the group find the act and their arrest has made them famous. They agree to forgo the plan, until Gaz learns that the show is sold out. He convinces the others to do it just for one night only. Gerald is unsure as he has now got the job that Gaz and Dave earlier tried to sabotage his interview for, but agrees to do it just once. Initially Dave still refuses, but regains his confidence after encouragement from his wife, Jean, and joins the rest of the group minutes before they go on stage. Nathan also arrives with Dave, having secretly come along, and tells Gaz that Mandy is there but she would not let Barry go with her.

Gaz refuses to do the act because there are men in the audience (including the police officers who watched the footage of the security camera's recording of them earlier), when the posters were supposed to say it was for women only. The other five are starting the act when Nathan orders his father to go out on stage. Gaz, proud of his son, joins the others and performs in front of the audience and Mandy, who seems to see him in a new light. The film finishes with the group performing on stage in front of an enthusiastic packed house, stripping to Tom Jones' version of "You Can Leave Your Hat On" (their hats being the final item removed) with astounding success.

Cast

Production

Channel 4 Films paid for the screenplay to be written but then declined to invest any equity in the film. Fox Searchlight ended up financing it for almost £3 million.[3]

The famous "Hot Stuff" scene, in which the characters dance in the queue at the job centre,[4] was originally going to be cut from the final production as it was considered "too unrealistic".[5]

The cast allegedly agreed that all six of them would really do the "full monty" strip at the end in front of 50 extras, provided they had to do only one take.[6] Hugo Speer told the Guardian in 2019: "The climactic scene was nuts. It was in a very cold working men’s club, starting at about midday. The makeup and costume girls knew how we were feeling, so they were thrusting glasses of alcohol into our hands between takes. The extras had smuggled in booze, too. They weren’t aware we were going to go all the way – that was a bit of smarts on the producers’ part, so it was a completely natural reaction they got at the end."[7]

The production and shooting was also said to be very challenging, with Robert Carlyle saying: "The Full Monty was a tough shoot, it really really was. Horrible." [8]

Locations

The film was shot entirely on location in and around Sheffield in April 1996, except for a couple of locations in Shirebrook, Derbyshire.[9][10]

The Reel Monty

The opening sequence of the Sheffield promotion film from 1972 is taken from City on the Move, a film commissioned by Peter Wigley, Sheffield's first ever publicity officer, to convince people that Sheffield was a centre for tourism and commerce. City on the Move was produced and directed by Jim and Marie-Luise Coulthard and showed a modern thriving city that was rapidly developing thanks to the successful steel industry in Sheffield. However, the film went virtually unnoticed until the Coulthards were approached about some of the footage being included in The Full Monty for a payment of £400, which they accepted. In 2008, City on the Move was released on DVD under the new name The Reel Monty.[11]

Language
Main article: Full monty (phrase)

The film features frequent use of British slang, and in particular Sheffielder dialect.

The film's title is a phrase generally used in the United Kingdom to mean "the whole lot", or "the whole hog"; in the film, the characters use it to refer to full nudity — as Horse says, "No one said anything to me about the full monty!" The phrase, whose origin is obscure, gained a renewed prominence in British culture following the film.

Other dialect words are used in the film; some such as nesh (meaning a person unusually susceptible to cold) are widespread across the North Midlands region. Jennel (an alley) is local to Sheffield:[12] it is a variation on the word "ginnel", which is in full versions of the Oxford English Dictionary and is used in many parts of England.

Release

Critical reception

The film surprised critics when it was first released, earning near-universal acclaim, and it went on to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. When the film was released in the United Kingdom, it topped the box office for the next three weekends, before being overtaken by Contact.[13][14][15][16][17]

Writing in Time Out New York regarding the implications of the film Andrew Johnston stated: "Monty is much less ribald than it sounds. The funniest moments are frequently the most subtle, like when five of the strippers, standing in the dole line, find themselves unable to resist dancing in place when Donna Summers's "Hot Stuff" comes on the radio. There's surprisingly little raunch, in part because the film can't stop thinking of women as enemies of a sort (at least Monty is less offensive than Brassed Off in that department). And refreshingly, its definition of male bonding is broad enough to let two of the lads find love in each other's arms."[18]

Review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes retrospectively reports that 96% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 48 reviews, with an average score of 7.51/10. The consensus reads, "Cheeky and infectiously good-natured, The Full Monty bares its big beating heart with a sly dose of ribald comedy."[19]

Accolades and recognition

The Full Monty won the BAFTA Award for Best Film in 1997, beating presumed frontrunners Titanic and L.A. Confidential and Carlyle won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. It was nominated for a total of four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Score and Best Original Screenplay.

In 1997, the Academy Award for Best Original Score was split up into two categories: Dramatic and Musical or Comedy. In light of 1997's big winner, Titanic, the film won only the Oscar for Best Original Musical or Comedy Score by Anne Dudley, with the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars going to Titanic and its director James Cameron and the Best Original Screenplay Oscar going to Ben Affleck and Matt Damon for Good Will Hunting. The film was also nominated for the prestigious Grand Prix of the Belgian Syndicate of Cinema Critics.

In 1999, it was ranked #25 on the BFI Top 100 British films list. In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted The Full Monty the 49th greatest comedy film of all time. By that year it earned an estimated £170 million at the box office worldwide.[20]

Controversy

New Zealand playwrights Anthony McCarten and Stephen Sinclair filed a £180 million lawsuit against the producers of The Full Monty in 1998.[21] They claim that the film blatantly infringed on their play Ladies Night, which toured both Britain and New Zealand.[22][23] Anthony McCarten and Stephen Sinclair created a website containing their play in response to statements from the producers of The Full Monty that claimed the two productions were not alike. The underlying rights were attributed to co-producer, Paul Bucknor, and the lawsuit was settled out of court; as part of the agreement, the website containing Ladies Night was shut down.[24]

Soundtrack

Anne Dudley's Oscar for Best Score was a surprise, and some critics felt undeserved, inasmuch as the award is for original music and most of the film's memorable moments had jukebox favourites playing.[25][26][27] Dudley composed "about 20 minutes' worth of music" for the film.[28] Bob Strauss called the Oscar "well-deserved",[29] while Pauline Reay felt Dudley's underscore complemented the familiar hits.[30] Dudley described her score to Steven Poole:[31]

It was this conglomeration of sounds—baritone sax, acoustic guitar, harmonica [...] The reasoning was that all these six men are different, they come from different backgrounds, but in the final scene it all works. The idea was that the instruments should do that as well—they all come from different places but they actually gel...
The Full Monty: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack
Soundtrack album by
Various Artists
Released1997
GenreDisco, Pop, Dance, Rock, Glam Rock, Heavy Metal
Length59:12
LabelRCA

The album The Full Monty: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack includes two original tracks by Dudley plus the pop hits, including a cover by Tom Jones of "You Can Leave Your Hat On" commissioned and produced by Dudley, who had collaborated with Jones on a 1988 cover of "Kiss".[28][32]

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic link
  1. "The Zodiac" – David Lindup (3:06)
  2. "You Sexy Thing" – Hot Chocolate (4:03)
  3. "You Can Leave Your Hat On" – Tom Jones (4:26)
  4. "Moving on Up" – M People (5:29)
  5. "Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)" – Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel (3:59)
  6. "The Full Monty" – Anne Dudley (3:04)
  7. "The Lunchbox Has Landed" – Anne Dudley (2:14)
  8. "Land of a Thousand Dances" – Wilson Pickett (2:24)
  9. "Rock & Roll, Pt. 2" – Gary Glitter (3:02)
  10. "Hot Stuff" – Donna Summer (3:49)
  11. "We Are Family" – Sister Sledge (3:35)
  12. "Flashdance... What a Feeling" – Irene Cara (3:49)
  13. "The Stripper" – Joe Loss & His Orchestra (2:11)

Adaptations
Main articles: The Full Monty (musical) and The Full Monty (play)

In 1998 the film was novelized by the British writer Wendy Holden.[33]

The film was adapted into a 2000 Broadway musical of the same name; the characters and setting were Americanized. The musical ran in the West End at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 2002.

It was also adapted into a stage play by the original screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, which opened at the Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield on 2 February 2013, directed by Sheffield Theatres artistic director Daniel Evans, before embarking on a national tour. It opened in the West End at the Noël Coward Theatre on 25 February 2014.

However, despite positive reviews, the show closed on 29 March, rather than the planned 14 June, after a run of just over a month.[34] A Portuguese-language version was adapted for theatrical performance in Brazil by Brazilian journalist Artur Xexéo. This version of the play was directed by Tadeu Aguiar, and debuted in Brazil on 6 October 2015.[35]

See also

References
  1. "The Full Monty (1997)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 3 March 2010.
  2. "THE FULL MONTY (15)". Fox Searchlight Pictures. British Board of Film Classification. 19 May 1997. Retrieved 21 September 2013.
  3. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/26/how-we-made-the-full-monty-bums
  4. Nightingale, Laura (3 February 2015). "Go all the way and leave your hat at home for The Full Monty in Woking". getsurrey. Retrieved 6 November 2018.
  5. "13 Naked Truths About The Full Monty". mentalfloss.com. 11 August 2017. Retrieved 7 February 2019.
  6. Knight-Ridder/Tribune, John Hartl. "`FULL MONTY' DIRECTOR GOES FOR CHARACTER-DRIVEN HUMOR". chicagotribune.com. Retrieved 7 February 2019.
  7. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/26/how-we-made-the-full-monty-bums
  8. Robert Carlyle was not expecting The Full Monty to be a hit – The Graham Norton Show 2017 – BBC One, retrieved 9 January 2020
  9. "Where was 'The Full Monty' filmed?". British Film Locations. Retrieved 6 June 2017.
  10. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/26/how-we-made-the-full-monty-bums
  11. "See Sheffield reel time in 1969" Archived 2 December 2008 at the Wayback Machine, The Star, 8 October 2008. Retrieved 11 October 2008.
  12. "Putting SY on the wordmap", BBC, 22 August 2005
  13. "Weekend box office 29th August 1997 - 2nd September 1997". www.25thframe.co.uk. Retrieved 4 April 2017.
  14. "Weekend box office 5th September 1997 - 7th September 1997". www.25thframe.co.uk. Retrieved 4 April 2017.
  15. "Weekend box office 12th September 1997 - 14th September 1997". www.25thframe.co.uk. Retrieved 4 April 2017.
  16. "Weekend box office 19th September 1997 - 21st September 1997". www.25thframe.co.uk. Retrieved 4 April 2017.
  17. "Weekend box office 26th September 1997 - 28th September 1997". www.25thframe.co.uk. Retrieved 4 April 2017.
  18. Johnston, Andrew (14 August 1997). "The Full Monty". Time Out New York.
  19. The Full Monty at Rotten Tomatoes
  20. Alexander Walker, Icons in the Fire: The Rise and Fall of Practically Everyone in the British Film Industry 1984–2000, Orion Books, 2005 p280
  21. "Full Monty Producers Sued by 2 New Zealand Playwrights". Playbill. Playbill.com. 3 March 1998. Archived from the original on 23 March 2014. Retrieved 22 March 2014.
  22. "Writers sue over The Full Monty", BBC News, 4 March 1998.
  23. 'Ladies' fight.', Campbell, Gordon. New Zealand Listener p. 25-26; 26 September 1998.
  24. "Hollywood Plagiarism", Weird Realm Film Reviews. Retrieved 1 October 2007.
  25. Bona, Damien (6 February 2002). Inside Oscar 2. Random House Publishing Group. p. 306. ISBN 9780345448002. Retrieved 27 November 2014. the Oscar to Anne Dudley for The Full Monty ... was somewhat surprising, since the music most remembered from the film was ... disco hits"
  26. Berardinelli, James (23 March 1998). "Commentary: A "Live" Look at the Oscars". Archived from the original on 5 December 2014. Retrieved 28 November 2014. To be quite frank, I can't remember anything about the original score of the film. All I remember are the pop songs.
  27. Burr, Ty (1 March 1998). "When Will Oscar Really Know the Score?". New York Times. Retrieved 27 November 2014.
  28. Fontaine, Rex (29 March 1998). "People: Early to bed for Anne and Oscar". The Independent on Sunday. Retrieved 27 November 2014.
  29. Strauss, Bob (24 March 1998). "Analysis: Oscars listing to mainstream". Daily News. Los Angeles. Retrieved 27 November 2014.
  30. Reay, Pauline (2004). Music in Film: Soundtracks and Synergy. Wallflower Press. p. 105. ISBN 9781903364659. Retrieved 27 November 2014.
  31. "Fingers and thumbs: With the Art of Noise's Anne Dudley". Steven Poole. 10 April 1998. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
  32. Dyja, Eddie (2010). Studying British Cinema, the 1990s. Columbia University Press. p. 106. ISBN 9781906733025. Tom Jones ... recorded it especially for the film
  33. Baetens, Jan (2007). From screen to text: novelization, the hidden continent. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521849624.016.
  34. "The Full Monty's West End run to end early". 17 March 2014 – via www.bbc.co.uk.
  35. "'Ou tudo ou nada' aborda crise com humor no Teatro Popular". 25 September 2015.
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