This film, based on the journals of Michael Palin's great-grandfather, is of course humorous, but also teaches a valuable lesson. The script is fantastic, the camera work is beautiful, the acting is superb, and the story, while entertaining, is also quite deep. A must-see for anyone looking for a good film.

There is plenty of atmosphere in this film. It portrays the conflict that occurred in the universities of the day (1866) between the traditional and the newer blood that was required to bring the universities into the modern world. It is almost an allegory showing the old world (Oxford) as it battles against the influence of new ideas represented by the new world (the 'American Friends'). Michael Palin is excellent in the role of Mr. Ashby. Throughout the film he portrays in a wonderful manner the bewilderment of facing the challenge of coming to terms with new order represented by Mr. Sime (Alfred Molina) in the challenge for the presidency of the college. In the end he follows his heart (and probably his head as well) and leaves the old world to its devices. Well worth watching.

I confess that I've never found Michael Palin very funny. His desperate mugging in "A Fish Called Wanda" marked a particular low. And his many, many travel documentaries have at times stretched to breaking point his ability to say something interesting about his journeys. But, and against type, his finest work as performer and writer is "American Friends" and it is very fine indeed.

Based on the true story of his great grandfather, it is a wonderful, gently comic evocation of the claustrophobic lives - and obligatory bachelorhood - of 1860's Oxford University academics (the repressive world which spawned Lewis Carrol). A wonderfully rich, gently comic performance too by veteran Robert Eddison as the dying head of the college, surrounded at the end simply by his college fellows. Entirely devoted to academic excellence and religiosity, only occasional male horseplay for some ever interrupted their high-minded bachelor lives. The natural candidate to take over as head of the college, the Palin character, thus seemed fated to live and die within its confines just as had his predecessor. Reluctantly persuaded to take a short walking summer holiday alone in the (beautifully filmed) Swiss Alps, suddenly into his late bachelor life comes Womanhood, Beauty - and Love - in the shapes of a middle-aged American lady and her young ward. Again a wonderful poignant dignified performance by Connie Booth; her young ward's youth and beauty making her suddenly aware that her own looks and prospects are now both very much on the downward slope.

An inauthentic jarring note was Alfred Molina's portrayal of Palin's academic rival; so openly leering, crude and dissolute, it was difficult to imagine that he could have coexisted with his high-minded fellows - unless they were so very unworldly that they failed to understand him.

Curiously very reminiscent indeed of "Goodbye Mr Chips" (1935),arguably American Friends is a far better film; subtle, gentle and beautiful. Palin was a student at Oxford and there is affection, respect and an intense attention to period feel in his portrayal of the character and the place.