In 1969 England, two out-of-work actors suffer in the squalor of a Camden Town flat, consuming epic quantities of booze and railing against the injustices of a world indifferent to their talents. And somehow, it's utterly hilarious.

Withnail and I was the pet project of writer and first-time director Bruce Robinson, who adapted his own unpublished novel about his life as a young actor. Robinson had been nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of The Killing Fields in 1984, and wrote Withnail and I for just one British pound.

The real star of the movie is the dialogue, hilariously vulgar and articulate, lines that you wouldn't hear anywhere else (and that they won't let me type here). Particularly as played by Richard E. Grant as Withnail, in his first film role -- indignant, entitled, and melodramatic, not to mention heroically drunk. With his posh diction and ramrod posture, combined with his drug-wild eyes and sweat slick hair, he's a singularly British character.

Paul McGann is the "I" of the title, left unnamed. Sensitive, paranoid, and practical, he's the antidote to Withnail's raging ego, and somehow the duo function, with Withnail as the guy who'd order them two quadruple scotches and two pints at closing time, and "I" as the one who'd get them home.

To escape the squalor of their shabby apartment, they go to Withnail's aristocratic Uncle Monty (the priceless Richard Griffiths), a tubby, longwinded fop with a warm spot for "I." Withnail cadges the key to Monty's estate, and they flee London for the Lake Country, which, they soon find, was not such a good idea. ("This," Withnail proclaims, "was a dreadful mistake.")

The cottage is rundown and cold, the locals surly and unwelcoming. When they finally arrange to buy food from a local farmer, he shows up with a live chicken. ("How can we make it die?") Old Monty arrives with a Rolls full of wine and hot hands for "I," who finds out that Withnail's strung him up as bait -- he's told the old man that he's gay (a "toilet trader"), and a sort of parody of the English country farce follows, with lashings of bawdy innuendo ("I hear you're a little wizard in the kitchen, I shall need you to work the joint.")

With Monty put off by a lie and "I" furious at Withnail, they head back to London, where "I" calls his agent and finds he's been offered a part -- the lead, in a play in Manchester. The movie closes on Withnail alone, bottle in hand, reciting Hamlet to the wolves through the bars at the London Zoo. (The novel ends with Withnail filling up a shotgun barrel with red wine, then pulling the trigger as he drinks it, but Robinson decided that was too dark. Ya think?)

When it was released, the movie barely inched over the $1.5 million mark at the box office in the U.S., but over the years has been embraced as a classic. It's spawned websites, books, a documentary short, and a drinking game (basically, drink when Withnail does) that inspired its own short film. It's also the British Caddyshack, the film drunk students quote in pubs around the country.

Robinson went on to write and direct How to Get Ahead in Advertsing and Jennifer 8. He's presently in production with an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary to star Johnny Depp, reuniting Robinson with drunkenness and general bad behavior.

Richard E. Grant appeared in L.A. Story, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Gosford Park (and, um, Spice World), and Paul McGann went on to movies like Alien3 and Queen of the Damned, and in 1996, played the eighth Doctor Who.

Drunkenness, rain, and surly English farmers may not sound like your idea of high comedy, but the dialogue is priceless, and the acting should somehow be hung up in a museum. Withnail may be an awful coward and a terrible friend, but every time he opens his mouth, it's gold.

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