Jack Hulbert is a somewhat atypical awful British comedian. Less awful than some, it’s more his undistinguished films that drag him down. He fits the Matthew Sweet formulation of looking like a human being reflected in a tap, but more precisely he looks like an inept drawing of a handsome man. While the stereotypical hero is supposed to have a lantern jaw, the Hulbert chin is more like a melted candle or perhaps a stalactite. Disturbing in a frontal view it surprises with an outward curve when viewed in profile, like its gotten caught in a mechanism. Like most chins, you can’t see it from the back, his neck’s in the way, and this is perhaps a blessing. Who knows what it’d get up to in a dorsal elevation.
THE CAMELS ARE COMING is a title that brings a smile to my lips, which the film itself rarely manages. It’s not totally cringe, though. Hulbert can do a parody of stiff-upper-lip acting which is quite winning. Rather than being a low-status chump man-child like Formby or Wisdom later on, or a smutty imp like Max Miller or Arthur Askey, Hulbert is more of a twit or silly ass. In his more sympathetic moments he can get you thinking how awkward it must have been to be a posh idiot, automatically placed in a position of power and responsibility by dint of race and birthright that you’re totally unequipped to handle. Then you reflect that there may be better people to feel sorry for in this situation.
TCAC has one thing most Awful British Comedian movies don’t have, which is production values, considerable location shooting having been accomplished in Egypt. It’s inspiring to see Hulbert, in blackface, patrolling the same historic sites Peter Ustinov and Mia Farrow would breeze through in DEATH ON THE NILE. History! The war would put a stop to this kind of foreign entanglement, and most ABCs are men of the sound stage or back lot almost exclusively.
Interesting credits — Tim Whelan, one of the team of piano-movers responsible for directing THIEF OF BAGDAD, is credited here, but the more interesting Robert Stevenson is his uncredited co-helmer. His KING SOLOMON’S MINES and NON-STOP NEW YORK and THE MAN WHO CHANGED HIS MIND are an Imperial ton of fun.
The fact that this is — maybe — an actual adaptation and spoof of a Biggles novel makes a lot of sense. What doesn’t make sense is that there’s nobody called Biggles in it and original author W.E. Johns gets no credit. I now learn that The Camels are Coming was the very first Biggles book in 1932. Already by 1934 considered too ridiculous to be played straight. Or, as seems possible, maybe they just stole the title. But the movie is about a heroic (but silly) British aviator, pretty much a Biggle parody. (The book derives its title from the Sopwith Camel, as also flown by Snoopy — but the filmmakers were right, it’s clearly a comedy title, even if you don’t immediately get the pun on The Campbells are Coming — which the soundtrack obligingly points out.)
Like CITIZEN KANE this begins with a fake newsreel. There, it’s fair to say, the resemblance ends. Hulbert’s ass or arse character has elements in common with Clouseau — you get the impression he knows he’s a nit, but is not smart enough to know everyone else knows it too, so he has to put on a front to try and keep his incompetence a secret. A man in hell.
Because Hulbert (whose more distorted brother Claude played silly ass Algie in several BULLDOG DRUMMOND pics) looks more like a travesty of a leading man, less like a genetic throwback to amphibian times, the problem of how to pair him with a convincing leading lady is less hideously awkward than it would be with Formby (who, improbably, co-starred with the gorgeous Googie Withers, Kay Walsh, Phyllis Calvert, Linden Travers, Kathleen Harrison and Elizabeth Allen). The decorous Anna Lee is cast opposite Jack. Her main technique is to grin amusedly in closeup and then be merely smiling, lips closed, when we cut to the wide shot. A fine method if you can master it. She’s winning, but it’s not certain she can act. She’d have to get in with John Ford to prove that.
Hulbert is a proper posh boy — educated at Winchester and Cambridge (a Cambridge footlight, like several Pythons, though it was a rather different outfit in his day). He appears in ELSTREE CALLING but likely missed being directed by Hitchcock. He seems to have been a decent chap. Married for many years to Cicely Courtnidge, who sometimes co-starred with him. He was once listed as Britain’s most most popular lead, which shows you.
Oh yes, racism. Considering the period, it’s not as awful as it might have been. Jack does black up to pass as Egyptian. Since most of the film’s other Egyptians are also played by white dudes, this isn’t as unconvincing as it’s probably meant to be. The film is about drug smuggling — does this mean it would have been banned in the US? Or maybe it wouldn’t have stood a chance of release there anywhere outside the UK — none of our awful comedians cracked America, though HEY! HEY! USA! (1938) paired Will Hay with Edgar Kennedy in a foredoomed attempt at breaking through to a new and bigger audience. But America always had bigger idiots of their own.
(Wikipedia notes that TCAC never got a US release, also that Anna Lee met and married Robert Stevenson, who’s billed as Associate Producer, on the picture.)
There are a couple of songs, I have to warn you. There’s an Arab caravan chorus about robbing and killing which is quite cheerful, and then Jack has a gratuitous solo number which is good fun. Speaking of which, here’s a fun drug trip musical number with Melesian trick effects from another Hulbert flick.
By coincidence, this song is memorably used in MURPHY’S WAR, for which I’ve recently made a video essay (for the Arrow Films Blu-ray release).
THE CAMELS ARE COMING is mostly harmless, if witless. It took four chumps to write this rubbish, plus Hulbert himself on dialogue. Had the story been stronger, the comic situations been more and funnier, he could have been inspired to greater heights. Still, I can’t say I wouldn’t watch another Hulbert film. BULLDOG JACK has Ralph Richardson in it, and KATE PLUS TEN is a comic thriller based on an Edgar Wallace “shocker.” I find Wallace unreadably dully, despite the fact that one third of novels sold in English used to be written by him, or some such fantastical statistic. Spoofing him seems like the correct approach, though even there he may be too tedious.
NB: Doesn’t actually look much good, apart from an imported Genevieve Tobin.
The big finish of TCAC, in a besieged fort with Jack shooting Arabs off their camels, is a bit uncomfortable. I don’t recall any films where even Germans in wartime get this kind of treatment — killed as slapstick. It makes you appreciate how careful Keaton was with the very black comedy in THE GENERAL’s battle scene. Other examples of this kind of thing: Tashlin’s SON OF PALEFACE, where the slaughter of Indians for laughs is now very uncomfortable, even though it could be defended as genre parody — alas it’s not really ATTACKING the genre assumptions — and from the same director, the weirdly dislikeable (and I love Tashlin when he’s good) MARRY ME AGAIN, which celebrates Bob “the Butcher of Strasbourg” Cummings’ wartime heroics by having him shoot down countless “Jap” fighter planes, for laffs.
A strange personal resonance — when I were a lad, at the local Odeon in the seventies there was an ad for Rank Cinemas, a montage of unknown film clips, culminating in a closeup of a masticating or ruminating camel, with the words COME – BACK – SOON appearing sequentially over its face. The shot, as I recall, was in black and white, showing how far behind the times Rank had fallen. This movie MAY be the source of the camel shot.
Verdict: Jack Hulbert is Not Entirely Awful, but his films kind of are.
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