''Four Weddings and a Funeral'' a surprise hit

The country that gave American moviegoers A Room With a View, Enchanted April, and Howards End has done it again: The veddy British romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral is the most unexpected hit of the spring. Check out any showing and you'll see a movie house packed with old and young, couples and singles, all laughing uproariously as the handsome yet self-deprecating Hugh Grant-surrounded by madly quipping friends-fights bad timing and fear of commitment in his pursuit of sophisticated American beauty Andie MacDowell.

There, however, Four Weddings' resemblance to its genteel British forerunners ends. This is no Classics Illustrated love story: In one scene, Grant, who has slept twice with his unrequited love, blurts out his feelings as she shops for the dress she'll be wearing when she marries another man: ''In the words of David Cassidy...while he was still with the Partridge Family, I think I love you.''

''As British films go,'' says Tim Bevan, the film's co-executive producer, ''it's not Merchant Ivory, not angst-ridden streets of London. While it's slightly old-fashioned, the first 10 words in the film are f -- -, which helps get the audience into it.''

And get into it they have. Unlike any previous specialized (read: upscale urban art-house) hit, Four Weddings, in its sixth week, became the No. 1 movie in the country. ''It's playing in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Davenport, Iowa,'' & gloats Russell Schwartz, president of Gramercy Pictures, the film's distributor. ''It's working in towns in Florida that sex, lies, and videotape (the 1989 benchmark independent hit) never got to.'' That feat, suggests Schwartz, may have to do with timing. ''After a winter when snow blanketed the East Coast, it's the first spring movie with pretty people in pretty clothes. And people who are getting married are thinking about weddings in June. It resonates in every small town in America.''

Four Weddings widened to 900 screens only last week, but it's already grossed $24.7 million, a spectacular sum for a low-budget foreign art film with one name American actress in a cast of British unknowns, and it could top out at twice that. Fueling the film's success is not only its uniqueness in a marketplace overcrowded with weak youth comedies but a winning mix of star elements: comedy screenwriter Richard Curtis (Mr. Bean, The Tall Guy), dramatic director Mike Newell (Dance With a Stranger, Enchanted April), and, most prominently, MacDowell and Grant, the couple smiling so radiantly in all those advertisements. Shrewdly, Gramercy made its stars linchpins of a national ad campaign that cost twice the film's $5 million production budget.

While the movie's universal themes have certainly helped it in mainstream America, Four Weddings had at its helm a group of hip Londoners who were bent on making a piece about people much like themselves. Writer Curtis, 37, says he began working on the script three years ago when he realized, after looking at his datebook, that he had attended 65 weddings in 11 years. In writing the film, Curtis sought to ''modernize some of those old Hollywood romantic comedies,'' even though, as he admits, ''we do end with a kiss in the rain.''

After Newell, 51, agreed to direct Four Weddings, Curtis labored for another year. ''I come from a school where making it funny is what matters,'' he says. ''Mike was obsessed with keeping it real. Every character, no matter how small, has a story, not just three funny lines. It's a romantic film about love and friendship that swims in a sea of jokes.''

The cast wasn't always sure that moviegoers would find Four Weddings so appealing. During filming last summer in Hertfordshire, after a hay-fever- stricken Grant had delivered a best-man speech intended to induce hilarity to a deathly silent wedding reception, he voiced strong doubts. ''I'm an eternal pessimist,'' he says. ''I thought I was atrocious. I was terrified by Andie-she's so attractive and such a big star. Getting a scene out was a miracle. I was planning my new career as a shelf filler at Woolworth's.''

Grant admits he didn't fully appreciate Newell's direction until after he saw the film. ''He seemed to be giving direction against what I thought were the natural beats of the comedy,'' he recalls. ''He was making a film with texture, grounding it, playing the truths rather than the gags.''

Despite Grant's worries, he and MacDowell had struck the right note from the start. In auditions, they ''sailed the lines right,'' says Bevan. ''The movie completely suited everything Hugh was able to do as an actor-it allowed all his charm, wit, timing, humor, beauty, and goodwill to come out.'' And, adds Curtis, ''Andie had a basic sweetness and goodness of heart, as well as being smart.''

For inspiration, MacDowell says she used Katharine Hepburn. ''This is the kind of role she would have played 40 years earlier,'' she says. ''She was forthright, the one with power and intelligence and the guts to say and do exactly what she wanted.''

While everyone has a theory about the film's success, it's probably the blend of romance and comedy that makes Four Weddingswork. ''It's a film with true wit,'' suggests Hollywood screenwriter Terry Curtis Fox (Fortress). ''It's what the Seinfeld crowd, who usually feel they have nothing to see, want to go to the movies for. It's a movie for people who want to be hip and married.''