The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain movie review (1995)

"Mountain" is in quotation marks because there is some doubt as to whether the elevation actually qualifies for that name.

Mountains must be at least 1,000 feet high. Anything smaller is a large hill. The locals are aghast: Their "mountain" has been a mountain since time immemorial, and any suggestion that it is otherwise would be a calamity. Indeed, the local pastor (Kenneth Griffith) considers the elevation very nearly as ecclesiastical as Ararat. The surveyors are named Reginald and George, and are played by Hugh Grant (in his first film since "Four Weddings and a Funeral") and Ian McNeice.

The instant they walk into the local inn, run by Morgan the Goat (Colm Meaney) they are nailed as outsiders; their accents would give them away even if it were not for their clothing, which in Reginald's case seems to have been supplied by a theatrical costumer with fanciful ideas about the surveying trade.

The men set up their instruments and get a first reading, of 930 feet. The townspeople are apoplectic. The surveyors emphasize that the reading is "preliminary," and that they will not have a more accurate reading until they can triangulate the local elevation with a nearby mountain whose height is known. That elevation, in turn, was measured by being compared with another elevation, and so on back into the dim origins of the O. S.

"But . . . who measured the first mountain?" a local wonders.

"God, my boy." In plot and atmosphere, "The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain" is a fond throwback to the British comedies of the 1950s in which earnest citizens went about their daily lives little realizing how eccentric they were. The British dote on eccentricity; one of their recent scientific surveys triumphantly concluded that the eccentric are happier and live longer than you and I (since we, of course, are not eccentric). Every character in this movie, with the possible exception of the fresh-cheeked local lass Betty of Cardiff (Tara Fitzgerald) is crazy as a bedbug, and none of them know it, and that is why they are so funny.

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