MOVIE REVIEW : COME ON IN, THE ‘WATER’ IS REFRESHING

“Water” (selected theaters) is so refreshingly funny that you’re tempted to forgive its tendency to run dry in its last half-hour.

Even as is, it boasts some of the wittiest lines heard on the screen since “A Private Function.” As it happens, both films were produced by Denis O’Brien and ex-Beatle George Harrison’s British-based HandMade Films, which turns out the closest equivalents to the great Ealing comedies as we seem able to get these days.

Indeed, “Water” vaguely recalls one of Ealing’s finest, “Tight Little Island,” in which a ship laden with whisky is wrecked on a small island in the Hebrides during World War II. The island in “Water” is a seemingly worthless speck in the Caribbean, a forgotten remnant of the British Empire, its good-natured governor (Michael Caine) dispatched there years earlier when his ex-dancer wife (Brenda Vaccaro) got carried away and performed “La Cucaracha” topless at a reception for the Duke of Edinburgh.

The film, shot in the unspoiled portions of St. Lucia, starts bubbling when Texas tycoon Fred Gwynne’s crew strikes tangy “designer water” instead of oil (it also has a certain special property, indicated by the island’s name, Cascara). Pretty soon everybody’s getting into the act--and that’s the problem.

“Water” gives the impression that director Dick Clement and his co-writers were so delighted with what they wrought that they got carried away and started piling it on. But they’ve ended up with too many strings to tie together--let alone follow--without losing crucial momentum. Worse yet, they trust the film’s resolution to rest upon a reggae-style liberation song, which unfortunately isn’t all that potent--even though it is performed by, among others, Ringo Starr, George Harrison (who had a hand in its writing) and Eric Clapton.

But, by golly, the getting there is a hoot. Dick Shawn has a hilarious cameo as a temperamental Hollywood movie star appearing in a delicious sendup of those macho oil company commercials that assure us no effort will be spared in the search for oil reserves.

Dennis Dugan is delightfully unctuous as Gwynne’s ambitious aide, and Billy Connolly and Chris Tummings are funny as the island’s pair of singing rebels. In a series of costumes that must have come from Carmen Miranda’s trunk, Vaccaro goes gorgeously over the top as a Latina spitfire, once Dolores of the Ernesto and Dolores dance team--and always pronouncing every “j” as a “y.” (So eager is she to flee Cascara that, at one point when it seems a possibility, she bursts out singing “I’m leaving on a yet plane. . . .”).

Leonard Rossiter is also a pleasure as a smug, flawlessly tailored representative of Her Majesty’s Government who’s arrived to shut down the island--and worse. Valerie Perrine is amusing as Gwynne’s environmental activist daughter, but her part is largely extraneous and terribly dated--by about a decade.

Best of all is the wry, benign presence of Michael Caine, upholder of the British virtue of civility yet the true standard-bearer of the islanders’ right to independence. He also gets “Water’s” (PG-13 for some risque moments) best line: Appraising yet another of his wife’s flamboyant displays of cabin fever, he remarks, “I sometimes think she misses the bright lights of Guatemala City.”