Askey, and you shall receive

Brought up short.

The first and last word on Arthur Askey, British comedy film star of the ’40s, belongs to Alexei Sayle ~

“Remember, people once laughed at Arthur Askey, and history has proved them wrong.”

I decided to give Arthur a try, having procured by nefarious means a copy of BEES IN PARADISE, which the esteemed Val Guest directed, co-scripted, and wrote the lyrics for. An air force crew bail out over an uncharted island where they find a civilization ruled by women, where men are routinely sacrificed two months after wedding one of the local beauties. Plus, everybody’s always singing. I’m not sure which of the two qualities makes the place, ironically named “Paradise,” less appealing.

The crew consist of Peter Graves — not that one. This one is an amicably hopeless actor, always smiling, whatever the scene, who was also a baronet, which must have been nice for him; Max Bacon, an overstuffed and very Jewish malaprop; Ronald Shiner, a standard-issue cocker-nee cheeky chappie; and our Arthur.

With the body of a ten-year-old and the head of a maths teacher, Askey is a strange looking fellow, but not in a way that immediately inclined me towards laughter. Such a response seemed cruel, somehow. After watching him for ten minutes or so, I did start to feel cruelly towards him, but I was no closer to laughing. There’s definitely a kind of cold-blooded comic skill to the man, but it all seemed very artificial, as did the script. Guest seemed to be under the influence of the Marx Brothers, and no doubt generations of music hall cross-talking comedy acts, and his material, like Askey’s performance, mimics the best of those traditions without ever actually generating the surprise or freshness needed to produce laughs. There’s a lot of meta-textual gags too, confirming Joe Dante’s assertion that breaking the fourth wall used to be a lot more common.

Arthur titters.

I was expecting the sexual politics to provide the laughs, and unintentional ones at that, but in fact there wasn’t very much in the way of dated sexism to raise chuckles. A pity, really. Here’s modern comic Harry Enfield spoofing that kind of idiocy, in one of his best sketches.

There were funny acts in the music hall — Chaplin and Stan Laurel both got their start there, and what I’ve heard of Dan Leno’s material is whimsical as hell but still funny, at least in places. But for some reason, the main way the medium is recalled today is in parodies of lousy and inscrutable old comedy, by way of spoof comedians like Tommy Cockles, Arthur Atkinson and Count Arthur Strong. And this does seem to represent a definite strain of British comedy.

Coming Soon…

FILM CLUB wants you! After lengthy and mostly sober consideration, I’ve elected to start our experiment in internet confluence, Film Club, off with Arthur’s suggestion, THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER (AKA ALL THAT MONEY CAN BUY), a William Dieterle classic from 1941.

Shadowplay requires that every man and woman in the land(s) shall watch along and report their findings next Monday when I blog about the movie. I’m hoping to snap the internet clean in two with the weight of insights generated.

I would be deee-lighted if those of you who haven’t seen the movie bought copies forthwith, pocket money allowing. You won’t regret it, I can guarantee that much. The movie is available from Masters of Cinema in the UK and Criterion in the US: trot along to Amazon and nab a copy now!

(For serious cheapskates, the movie is also on YouTube — but what I suggest you do is, watch the first ten minutes, realize you’re in the presence of greatness, and shell out the necessary simoleons to own your own pristine Digital Versatile Disc of said movie meisterwerk.

Following hard on the heels of CITIZEN KANE, Dieterle’s film employs some of the same German Expressionist tropes, only more German. Editor Robert Wise and compose Bernard Herrmann came fresh from KANE to this one, and I think BH’s score may be his best ever. My scratchy old vinyl recording of it attests to my love of its exuberant oomph.

Cast — Walter Huston — regular readers will know how much I deplore hyperbole, but truly, Mr. Huston is arguably the world’s greatest thing. Edward Arnold — the man has a certain way about him — when he scrunches up his face like an adorable puppy it does kind of make me want to hide behind the curtains, but he’s good. And Simone Simon, being unspeakably French. Nobody has ever been this French, honestly. She makes Maurice Chevalier look Swedish.

Story — an American retelling of Faust. But not like THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE, I promise.

Look –

OK, so it’s not a great trailer. The film died. Like a dog. I think people are put off by that kind of “a story so captivating in its winsome uniqueness –” baloney. What we’re talking about is a gripping slice of Cinema Fantastique. You will thrill.

So, a week from now?

Intertitle of the Week: War is Heck

The Kaiser criticises his staff for neglecting a briefing in SHOULDER ARMS.

I’m reading Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside as slowly as possible to prolong the pleasure, and watching along with the book — viewing the Chaplin films dealt with in the text as they come up. I’m not sure if there are going to be more than two, but I suspect so: the titular SUNNYSIDE would seem a likely candidate, after all.

SHOULDER ARMS is the film Chaplin’s friends advised him not to make. A comedy about WWI? From a director/star who had been publicly criticized for his failure to enlist? Gold charts the process by which Chaplin managed to tiptoe around the various land-mines littering the no-man’s land in his artistic path. Casting the German enemy as Keystone Kops pus things on a fantastical footing, and showing the travails of the working soldier in a sympathetic light, Chaplin made a film which, while not of his highest standard, must have offered cathartic relief to audiences at the time. And a few bits are really good, notably the gags in the flooded trench.

This is where Chaplin goes to sleep, underwater, breathing through a gramophone horn, and this is where I expected to see him wake up, after the extended fantasy sequence that sees him disguised as a Tolkein ent, meeting Edna Purviance (who manages to seem French just by skilled use of body language) and capturing the Kaiser (played by brother Sydney). This would mean that the rainy, miserable part of the film would be reality, and the rest a dream. Instead, Chaplin wakes up all the way back in basic training, which seems a bit extreme, but was probably another way for CC to cover his ass: the critics can’t object to a film about the war if the protagonist (“the doughboy”) never actually makes it “Over there.”

In his novel, Gold does a great job of thinking his way inside Chaplin’s head, but by having Chaplin express misgivings about the “It was all a dream” ending, perhaps he gives CC too much credit. Chaplin would use the hackneyed device again, and in any case was not highly educated or a man with much experience in dramatic writing apart from what he did for the movies. He was inventing his own rules, “writing” by way of rehearsal, and would sometimes take the easy way out when he found himself painted into a narrative corner. And as I’ve suggested, the dream stratagem may have been used, not out of desperation, but to defuse the possible offense of his subject.

My favourite image in SHOULDER ARMS is actually this chauffeur, whose appearance (funny and sinister) is accompanied by a stab of horror movie music in Chaplin’s score.

Anyway, the film is also striking for the things it anticipates: an early tracking shot along a trench looks just like PATHS OF GLORY, only with the Little Fellow in it instead of big fellow Kirk Douglas. Makes Kubrick look a bit cheeky for suggesting that Chaplin was all form and no content. Chaplin’s serial number is 13. Michael Crawford in HOW I WON THE WAR is 131313. Richard Lester, that film’s director, certainly knows his silent comedy. When Chaplin holds a wine bottle aloft so an enemy sniper’s bullet can de-cork it, he’s anticipating Frank Finlay in THE FOUR MUSKETEERS…