Splitting Heirs
| Splitting Heirs | |
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Theatrical release poster.
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| Directed by | Robert Young |
| Produced by | Simon Bosanquet Redmond Morris |
| Written by | Eric Idle |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Michael Kamen |
| Cinematography | Tony Pierce-Roberts |
| Edited by | John Jympson |
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Production
company |
Prominent Features
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| Distributed by |
UIP (UK/International) Universal Pictures (US/Canada) |
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Release date
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Running time
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87 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $3,246,063 (USA) |
Splitting Heirs is a 1993 British film starring Eric Idle, Rick Moranis, Barbara Hershey, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Cleese and Sadie Frost. The film was directed by Robert Young, and features music by Michael Kamen. It was entered in the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.
The film centres on the family of the Dukes of Bournemouth (England), upon which misfortune has fallen throughout history, leading its members to believe the family is cursed. The most recent heir, Thomas Henry Butterfly Rainbow Peace, was left in a restaurant as an infant in the 1960s; by the time his parents remembered him, he had disappeared. Meanwhile, in the 1990s Tommy Patel has grown up in an Asian/Indian family in Southall, never doubting his ethnicity despite being taller than anyone else in the house, fair-haired, blue-eyed, light-skinned—and not liking curry. From the family corner shop he commutes to the City where he works for the Bournemouth family's stockbroking firm, handling multimillion-pound deals.
Tommy is given the job of acting as host to the visiting American representative of the firm, Henry Bullock, who turns out to be the son of the head of the firm, the present Duke. They become friends and the friendship survives Henry becoming the new Duke when his father dies. Circumstantial evidence shows that the true Bournemouth heir is actually Tommy; we see a series of family portraits each of which captures something of Tommy's facial characteristics, and his Indian mother tells him the story of his adoption. He consults the lawyer who dealt with his adoption, Raoul P. Shadgrind, who says Tommy has no hope of proving his claim, but plants the idea of him obtaining his rightful place in the family by getting Henry out of the way; Shadgrind himself then engineers a variety of 'accidents' in the belief that he will share in the spoils as Tommy's partner. The delightfully-complicated love interest comes with Tommy's and Henry's (shared at the same time) lover, later the new Duchess and their (shared at different times) mother, the dowager Duchess. As befits a classical comedy of errors, the final resolution of everyone's doubts and misconceptions leaves everyone living "happily ever after - "well, for a bit, at least..."
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