I come not merely to mock Awful British Comedians, which might get tedious — it does, believe me — but to see if within or around their awfulness lurks anything more interesting. It usually does, though I may be grading on some curve of desperation here.
Take the Crazy Gang, a conglomeration of comics too unappealing or one-note to hold up one at a time. So nature, or the music hall circuit formed them first into double acts, then into a sextet, and inserted them into a few films in a spirit of morbid experiment. I have long thought that the titles O-KAY FOR SOUND, THE FROZEN LIMITS, GASBAGS and especially ALF’S BUTTON AFLOAT are passable works of beat poetry or something resembling the fold-in technique, word salads or casseroles that provoke idle wonderment. How could a film called ALF’S BUTTON AFLOAT get made? What market research adjudged it a B.O. draw? Then, like other British institutions, the team “enjoyed” a latter-day reunion, akin to THE WILDCATS OF ST TRINIAN’S or CARRY ON EMMANUELLE, Val Guest’s LIFE IS A CIRCUS which, as a 1960 production, came too soon to wallow in permissive sleaze like the saucy schoolgirls or genocidal explorers in the Launder-Gilliat or Rogers-Thomas series. It has a 7.9 IMDb rating, which is pretty incredible. I may have to see it.
(Research reveals that there was a comedy theatrical warhorse called Alf’s Button — already weird — and that remaking it on ship led to the even stranger ultimate title, which surely Burroughs would have enjoyed._
Val Guest is fairly central to the Awful British Comedian sub-sub-genre. As the hardest-working man in British showbiz he penned gags and plotlines for Ralph Lynn, Will Hay, Arthur Askey, Robin Askwith and finally Cannon & Ball. He lived to be ninety-five and death cannot have come too soon.
Thing is, Guest is a very interesting filmmaker, at least intermittently, when he hits his stride in the mid-fifties. But not in the comedy genre.
I decided to start with O-KAY FOR SOUND, because it looked like being a HELLZAPOPPIN’ style comic revue set in a beleaguered British movie studio, Super-Colossal Pictures. The Crazy Gang are buskers accidentally hired as extras (via another mysterious comedy mainstay, Graham Moffat, who specialised in adolescent fat boys called Albert, a somewhat restrictive field one would think but not a crowded one, at least until he materialised in it) and then mistaken for financial backers. It’s an excuse for the clowns to wander about wisecracking or anyway stupidcracking and disrupting musical numbers.
The Crazy Gang, in no particular order, are Flanagan & Allen, Nervo & Knox, and Naughton & Gold.
Buf Flanagan is somewhat interesting to me. BF was the stage name of Chaim Reuven Weintrop (the pretense at Irishness isn’t even tissue-thin). He sang the theme tune to Dad’s Army, in one take, right before he died, and then carried on a weird posthumous career impersonated by comic and music hall historian Roy Hudd, who would appear at Royal Variety Performances with Flanagan’s old partner, wearing Flanagan’s old coat.
Chesney Allen is a bit posh, also tallish and thinnish, making a good physical contrast, which the other duos in the team signally lack. The singer Chesney Hawke is named after him, apparently.
What Flanagan & Allen do best is singing, actually. “Underneath the Arches” is lovely, even if it does sentimentalize homelessness (“Underneath the arches, we’ll dream our dreams away.”) Most of their songs have a bit where Flanagan sings while Allen does a recitative thing, very pleasant. “Free” in this film is a rare grace note amid the messing about.
Then there’s Nervo and Knox, who I couldn’t work out at all. Jimmy Nervo, which is a fake name for James Henry Holloway, uses another fake name, Cecil, for his character, which is necessary because Cecil can’t pronounce his Ss. But they don’t emerge as a Sylvester the cat “th” sound, but as an indescribably mushy squeak unknown to phonology.
(Old-school use of speech defects for comedy purposes is a bit cruel. New-fangled pretending that speech defects don’t exist seems an imperfect solution, though.)
Nervo’s partner Teddy Knox, like him a lapsed juggler, is the same man but without the lisp and moustache.
Also nearly indistinguishable are diminutive Glaswegians Jimmy Gold and Charlie Naughton. One has hair, the other doesn’t. Jimmy was born James Joseph Mcgonigal, making him a strange case of a comedian changing his name to sound more Jewish and less comical. Charlie Naughton (real name) is a considerable comic acrobat, who taught Gold how to take a fall but takes most of them here.
As if in silent echo of my inability to keep these comedians straight as I watch them, the IMDb provides no profile pics for any of them.
Director Marcel Varnel, the prime mover in the field of Awful British Comedians, is good at blocking, so he’s able to concoct some sense of visual unity by moving smoothly from one clown to the next.
Also present, as combustible studio exec Hyman Goldberger (co-writer Val Guest was quite keen to put Jewishness out front in his comedy writing) is American Fred Duprez, father of THIEF OF BAGDAD star June Duprez. His stereotyped Goldwynesque malapropisms can be slightly hard to take, but they’re shameless, you have to give them that.
There’s also the ubiquitous Graham Moffat, as another Albert (or the same one?), studio doorman — rather cutely, this was the real-life Moffat’s first job, and it’s how he got discovered for the movies.
“Plotless” would be a polite word for this film, it’s a term which might be misconstrued as meaning the movie knows what a plot is and has chosen not to have one. There is no sign this is true. At the end of the film, the Crazy Gang rush a movie into cinemas which consists of bits of a half-dozen different incomplete features. The result does not seem to be more or less coherent than this one, which may be intended as part of the joke, but if so it’s on us.
There is also a blackface routine, not particularly a British music hall tradition but a recurring theme/problem in British movies of this period. Partly there’s a misconception that everything American is cool and should be imitated. Partly there’s another misconception that doing this shit badly in parody will negate offence. And partly I just don’t know what anybody was thinking. Blackface is always bad. In different ways…. but none is less awful.
The movie pauses to allow for an incredible apache dance by Lucienne and Ashour — merged somehow with a jitterbug, the two most aggressive and dangerous dances ever perpetrated — in which a pomaded slicker hurls a hefty hoofer about with maximum force, and then is hurled around by her in turn. This neatly releases the tension created when one sees a man mistreat a woman. Also, it’s pretty spectacularly done. Also, there’s not even the slenderest reason for it to happen. If the Gang had infiltrated Super-Colossal Pictures, it could be a routine, a film scene. But they’re in a pawn shop or something. Among other things, the sequence proves that big women can dance, which raises the question why they’re never seen doing so in showbiz today?
There’s some attempt, I think, to position the Gang as Marxian in their madness, and they’re certainly (ugh) zany. But the Marxes are a different barrel of herring. Flanagan, Nervo, etc, seem to make jokes to laugh at themselves. I think it’s a category error to think that comedy is supposed to be made of jokes. True, Groucho cracks wise, but it’s crucial that nobody seems to notice and this is the source of his pleasure, if he’s even having any. Most of his jokes are insults, too, so they’re rooted in his character. Chico tells jokes but these are characterised as moron repartee. His best material is idiocy rather than wit. And Harpo of course is beyond all verbal stuff.
From the Marxes, the Crazy Gang have also filched the idea of frenzied neanderthal girl-chasing, which they pull off less successfully than their transatlantic predecessors. A difficult thing to get away with, to modern eyes. The Marxes somehow seem to manage it, perhaps because Harpo’s approach has a childish innocence, perhaps because women, if they like the Marxes at all, find Groucho kind of appealing. Chico never seems to get very close to romantic success, which is just as well.
The Crazy Gang, predictably, seem like grubby middle-aged chancers when they flirt, fondle or leer. Repeated gags about leading lady Enid Stamp-Taylor losing her skirt are mainly obnoxious, tying the film to the seaside postcard vein of smut and to generations of pent-up porn-adjacent sleaze which would erupt in the seventies in inappropriate venues like OOH… YOU ARE AWFUL and FRENZY (both 1972) — the return of the repressed, grown rancid in exile.
BUT — the more I see of Awful British Comedians, the more interested and sympathetic I get. (Stockholm syndrome?) And that other title, ALF’S BUTTON AFLOAT, is hard to resist. And LIFE’S A CIRCUS has that surprisingly high IMDb rating…
VERDICT: The Crazy Gang are somewhat awful, but unusual. Maybe there’s something there.
shadowplay 