Brit Parade

Some of Britain's great exports are universally acknowledged: the Beatles, Bass ale, John Cleese. Others reflect more personal tastes: You say Marmite, I say the Jam. Among the least recognized of the nation's cultural wares, though, are the Little Movies That Could. I'm not talking about Merchant Ivory-style coffee-table flicks but films like The Full Monty: scruffy heart-warmers that seemingly come out of East Bumbleshire and end up vying for Best Picture at the Oscars.

These movies are often too sentimental to win over the American critics, nor do they feature any heirs to Olivier (can you imagine Monty with Kenneth Branagh and Gary Oldman up there doffing their duds to Donna Summer?). Their appeal is, simply, ordinariness: In characters, setting, and story they remind the greater non-art house U.S. audience that -- despite what we see on PBS -- British people are shockingly like you or me.

The Full Monty hits home video on March 17, six days before the Oscars. Although nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Peter Cattaneo), Best Original Screenplay (Simon Beaufoy), and Best Musical or Comedy Score, it's likely that this sweetly engaging, if predictable, charmer will get swamped in Titanic's backwash. No matter: As with other British sleepers, the honor is in being included in the first place (if Monty were artsier or more populist, it probably wouldn't be nominated at all).

The only Little English Movie That Did, in fact, win a Best Picture Oscar (against Reds, On Golden Pond, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, no less) was Chariots of Fire (1981, Warner, PG, $19.98), and you'd better believe the Rocky-esque sports angle had something to do with it. So did Vangelis' chiming synthesizer score, the only element that smells funky now. Set around the 1924 Olympics, the Hugh Hudson film is ostensibly a costume drama, but since its two key characters spend so much time on the track oval -- the minister (Ian Charleson) running for God, the Jewish Cantabrigian (Ben Cross) outrunning prejudice -- Chariots still seems earnestly timeless.

The Crying Game (1992, LIVE, R, $14.98), by contrast, already feels like a quintessentially early-'90s period piece. Still, it proved that if it's possible to manufacture a little British hit via marketing and a major gimmick (if you don't know by now, I'm not going to spoil it for you), the movie had better be good. Written and directed by Neil Jordan (who won an Oscar for his script), Crying is remarkably hard to pin down: It's an IRA war film; no, wait, it's a mystery; oops, it's a star-crossed love story; hold on, it's a thriller. Keeping the film on track is the troubled honesty of the central figure -- Stephen Rea as an IRA gunman who finds himself emotionally in over his head with the girlfriend (Jaye Davidson) of a former hostage -- even as the latter's performance looks increasingly like the rare instance of lightning captured in a bottle.

Two years later, Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994, PolyGram, R, $14.95) didn't need a promo blitz to win over American audiences; besides being smartly acted and well written, this was a feel-good romance with big laughs (Rowan Atkinson as a vow-flubbing priest), big tears (John Hannah reading Auden's ''Funeral Blues'' over Simon Callow's casket), and a cute leading man (Hugh Grant, before Divine intervention). In fact, the film's weak link was its one concession to U.S. audiences -- Andie MacDowell as Grant's love interest -- while the closeness of its characters struck sparks of recognition in anyone who's had a circle of friends.

The Full Monty plays its cards with much less finesse: It's a blue-collar comedy with a big heart, as opposed to a yuppie comedy with good lines. But if Robert Carlyle sticks in your craw as a lovable Sheffield lug tryin' to ''dew raht'' by his young son (especially if you're still having nightmares about the actor's psychotic Begbie in Trainspotting), it's hard to dislike a movie about six average blokes working up the nerve to strip to Gary Glitter's ''Rock and Roll Part 2.'' Whenever Monty's calculation peers through -- except for the beefcake and the black guy, all of the characters must overcome a Personal Travail before they can take their misbegotten Chippendales act to the stage -- the day is saved by Mark Addy's corpulent and tartly realistic Dave. ''Antiwrinkle cream there may be,'' Dave says at one point, ''but anti-fat bastard cream there is not.'' Alone among the 1997 Best Picture nominees, Monty stakes its claim for fat bastards everywhere: Its triumph is that there's nothing Titanic about it at all. Monty: B Chariots: B+ Crying Game: A- Four Weddings: A

[BOX]

The Full Monty 1997 FOXVIDEO $103.99 RATED R

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