Sample titles of IMDb reviews of Charlie Drake films:
“Another TV comic bites the dust”
“Too much of a mediocre thing”
“Stupid movie with strangely short actor.”
“Now we know what’s inside a Dalek!”
“If a joke doesn’t work keep on trying”
and, my favourite:
“NO”
I’m looking at THE CRACKSMAN (1963). Drake was big on ITV, had hit comedy records, and so somebody had to try him in the movies. Several somebodies, in fact. John Paddy Carstairs, Norman Wisdom’s first and I guess best director, had the first shot. David MacDonald, whose straight dramas (THE BROTHERS) tend to crack me up, paired him with sex goddess Anne Heywood. Peter Graham Scott tried twice. Finally Gerry O’Hara made a miniaturisation comedy for the Children’s Film Foundation. He never took off.
None of these films is easy to see in decent quality, which is kind of a shame because Harry Waxman who shot BRIGHTON ROCK and SAPPHIRE did THE CRACKSMAN. It looks horrible in a grainy TV pan-and-scan. Ron Goodwin does the music, a typical jaunty march. Lots of touristic London landmarks, always a bad sign.
Still, Dennis Price and George Sanders offer suave support. Drake has a tendency to affect a comically inept posh accent, so the class angle is nicely pointed up by having these guys exploiting our pint-sized hero. (The distaste for Awful British Comedians could be a bit classist, couldn’t it? Before Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python, professional comedians in Britain tended to be working class, and they came from either the music hall or working men’s pubs. And then there was a sea change and most of the old guys came to be regarded as Awful…)
Drake is very small and very ginger. He was from the Elephant and Castle, which makes the idea of pairing him with Michael Caine seem like a natural, but alas that never happened. They have the same haircut.
Heresy time — I like Drake better than Norman Wisdom. I think he’s talented, and he’s not as desperate to milk pathos out of every reversal. The movie tries for a bit of the Chaplinesque, but Drake isn’t too eager to get on board. The lack of flop sweat effort makes him much more relaxing to watch.
Yeah, the film is still dreadful though.
Peter Graham Scott can’t do slapstick to save his life. He did direct Children of the Stones on TV though, so I’ll cut him some slack. Also CAPTAIN CLEGG. But also THE HEADLESS GHOST which is unbelievable tripe. (We like tripe in Britain, we eat it up.) There’s an awful gag where Drake falls into a low-budget offscreen pond and emerges blacked-up with mud and sporting seaweed dreadlocks. Seaweed? Doesn’t even make sense. There are a few smiles to be had from his gadget-strewn home/locksmith’s shop. I like gadgets. I eat ’em up.
Visual gags are difficult. They require invention, cinematic skill, and they have to suit the story, the style and especially the performer. British cinema had all these crap comics requiring visual material when they made the leap to films, but nobody seemed to be able to do it, or if they did they couldn’t get a job. One reason I idolise Richard Lester is he was the honourable exception.
There are other interesting people in this — comedy legend Ronnie Barker, executing a lightning sketch of what would become his masterpiece, Norman Stanley Fletcher from sitcom Porridge — Finlay Currie, Carol Cleveland. And occasional moments of cinema — if the film had more genre parody, Scott might be on a surer footing. A tracking shot past rows of convicts exchanging rumours is nicely choreographed, an unexpected whiff of actual cinema.
In fairness to the director, the compositions here have been so insensitively hacked about it’s impossible to know if it were ever attractively framed. The pan-and-scan appears to have been in the hands of some Norman Wisdom character. Here’s a two-shot:
Such butchery, along with the pinked colour and fuzzy transfer, adds to the film’s dystopian quality, which is intense. Drake is a little ray of sunshine, comparatively. It feels like he could have made it in movies if only he’d had the support. The resources are here — Technicolor and Cinemascope and co-stars (admittedly Sanders and Price would appear in literally any old rubbish, but they do lend class) — but not the script or gags. A resourceful comic can do a lot with a little, but you need SITUATIONS.
There’s a mass fight in a sort of private museum at the end. Lots of spot gags involving unlikely props (boomerang, guillotine, stuffed snake) but they’re all murdered by the execution. While they might be slightly better if you could see the whole image, you can tell by the editing that nothing much is working.
Drake’s debut feature, SANDS OF THE DESERT, tries to clone the shoddy Wisdom format without a budget. The “production values” astonish by their absence. It call it “threadbare” would flatter it with the implication that including threads had been considered. This is a feature of some ABC films but not all: Formby movies moved from the poverty row clapboard emptiness of his Mancunian Films productions, to relatively lavish stuff at Ealing, with big sets and ambitious model effects. MOTHER RILEY MEETS THE VAMPIRE is cheap-looking, but tries. OLD MOTHER RILEY’S GHOSTS, despite some sizeable sets, has the air of a rough assembly edit shot by chimpanzees.
One can imagine, if one closes one’s eyes and strains, a creative filmmaker using the constraints of a pitifully inadequate budget to make an Arabian-set comedy in a stylised Melies fashion. This movie, of course, does not do that — like the misbegotten ARE YOU BEING SERVED? movie, or CARRY ON ABROAD, it tries to simulate exotic locations with tiny, cramped sets. True, Drake is a small man, but his co-stars are of average size, and they can barely stand erect without overshooting the cyclorama here. I got nostalgic about THE CAMELS ARE COMING faster than you’d think possible.
As with Formby or Hay pictures, the costlier stuff is done with model effects, only much cheaper ones. These almost acquire a naive tabletop charm, like a Smallfilms children’s animation, or Michael Bentine’s Potty Time. If the film had the courage to make its crapness part of the joke, it might kind of succeed. Norman Wisdom described his typical screen persona as “a successful failure” — that’s what these films should be aiming for, stressing their underdog status. SANDS can’t even afford the odd circus camel, like the lopsided dromedary I saw as a kid whose hump was sagging down its side like a Salvador Dali watch. Mainly everybody just rides donkeys. Again, this could be funny if the film wanted it to be and knew how to signal its intentions — think of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL’s coconut shells. This is more like the crummy backdrops of CARRY ON COLUMBUS — just THERE, occupying screen space, sort of whistling innocently to itself as if we might mistake it for something adequate. Which sums up the whole film.
Raymond Huntley, a genre staple in ABC pictures, is an irate boss. Marne Maitland, Tutte Lemkow and Roger Delgado are faux-swarthy types. Racism and cheapskate exoticism are taken as read. When Charlie accidentally upsets a pair of Japanese tourists on his flight, his clueless response — “There’s no need to get excited about it — you Latin races are all the same!” — kind of short-circuits the possible offensiveness. I think.
Like its hero, SANDS OF THE DESERT is so puny-looking I feel bad about attacking it. But I can only imagine how anybody would have felt after paying money to see this.
Drake is known today, if at all, for two things — a sketch show bit where he embodies an entire orchestra. Simple but effective VFX — editing, splitscreen, mirrors, and maybe a sort of multifaceted flyvision lens. Passable gags. Quite nice.
And also for a gag that went wrong — solid shelves were fitted instead of breakaway ones, and he got flung into them and knocked cold live on air. Desperate to finish the sketch with a star higher up the Glasgow coma scale than was traditional, his co-stars carry on throwing his lifeless little body about the set.
I was shown this as part of my health & safety training at the BBC and it suitably horrified me. Rumours persist that the carpenters fixed the shelves on purpose because Drake was so despised. (Not as comic: as bloke.)
THE CRACKSMAN stars Baron Hardon; Addison DeWitt; Hector Snipe; Dame Margot Fonteyn; General Willard; Magwitch; Sgt. Grogan; Sir Frederick Gray; Sergeant Cuff; Bilbo (voice); Calibos; Norman Stanley Fletcher; Col. Virginia Lake; Fiddler; Zoot/Dingo; and Ayak.
SANDS OF THE DESERT stars Smallweed; Colonel Sharki; Maid Marian Fitzwalter; Joseph Whemple; Dr. Guani – Foreign Minister, Uruguy; President Sandover Haleesh; The Malay; The Master; Fiddler; and Sister Briony.
Verdict: Charlie Chase had some talent; his films act like brick walls constructed to obscure it.
shadowplay 