Awful British Comedians

So, along the way, during my progress in life, I seem to have acquired a box set of Will Hay films, a bigger box set of Norman Wisdom films, Arthur Askey’s THE GHOST TRAIN, and an extensive collection of George Formby bootlegs. One disc seems to have six hours of George on it, a heartbreaking thought.

I’m not going to watch all those, am I? Masochism has limits. But maybe I can blog about the odd sample. Of course it would be wrong to exclude Arthur Lucan (Old Mother Riley) and I’ve never seen a Charlie Drake movie, although I have seen him do some “straight” acting. Who else? I like some of the Carry On films and don’t consider those actors awful, but the later entries in the series are plenty gruesome, and the “sexy” knock-offs — Confessions of… etc are incredibly terrible. If a requirement of an awful British comedian is a ghastly face, maybe Robin Askwith counts. But I don’t really dislike him as a performer. It’s the things he tended to perform in that give me the dry heaves. I don’t know that I’m going to watch any of those — I take the conspiratorial view that the saucy British sex comedy was part of a government programme, Operation Prole-Wipe, aimed at reducing reproduction among the working classes. One glance at Askwith’s encrimsoned features in the act of love is enough to ensure a month’s uninterrupted sterility — it’s an unshakeable article of faith with me.

Is Tommy Steele a comedian, as such? He’s definitely awful. And he fits in with most of these others, in that I have a sneaking affection for him. Part of being British is having a sneaking affection for really indefensible tripe, including actual literal tripe. Formby and Wisdom and Steele were on TV a lot when I was a kid, and I enjoyed their singing, mugging and falling over. On the other hand, Frankie Howerd was a comedian of minor genius, but his films are generally awful. I’m in two minds with Frankie.

Maybe we should work out some ground rules. A true awful British comedian should, in Matthew Sweet’s memorable phrase, “like a human being reflected in a tap.” Yes, he was speaking of George. The best A.B.C.’s tend to be northerners, but that’s more of a guideline. Most of the fellows I’m thinking of are from the 1930s, 40s and 50s, but I think the trend continues, in attenuated form, at least as late as Cannon & Ball in Val Guest’s BOYS IN BLUE (1983) and Roy “Chubby” Brown in U.F.O. Most of them are aimed at working class audiences, often working class children, and many of them are working class themselves, but not all (stand up, Jack Hulbert).

Too bad Wilson & Keppel never made a major motion picture of their own.

Along the way, I’ll be checking out comics I’m barely familiar with, like the Crazy Gang. I might find some who aren’t so awful after all. I’ll write about them anyway. This will lead me into consideration of neglected filmmakers like Val Guest and Marcel Varnel. And I’ll take suggestions, starting now! Also interested in impassioned defences of your favourite A.B.C.s. I realise some of them do have fans.

The Sunday Intertitle: The Cabinet of Don Quixote

Here’s the first Segundo de Chomon film I found that has contiguous editing — our vacuuming hooligans pass consistently from left to right, from shot to shot. The great Melies imitator (but Chomon is so much more!) has picked up on Melies’ staging practice in 1908 but here reverses his usual right-to-left flow. Holding a mirror up to art.

But in 1906’s THE BEWITCHED SHEPHERD he hasn’t got the message yet. Since Chomon was definitely definitely seeing Melies’ films and studying them closely (over in Hove, James Williamson was only definitely doing that), it’s interesting that it took him five or six years to notice the contiguous staging and cutting. Because, I guess, when a cut matches, it is less noticeable than one which clashes. And it’s harder to notice something that’s less noticeable.

Here’s a 1907 film, THE YAWNER which shows that, while yawning is contagious (a kind of physiological meme), contiguity editing isn’t, or at least the idea travels more slowly.

Emile Cohl, another of the great fantasists, was a graphic artist and so one might expect him to grasp this stuff, as Melies had done, early on. But he didn’t get started until 1907, when contiguity editing was already a thing in Britain, France and America, though not applied by everyone.

We saw one Ferdinand Zecca film in an earlier post. An exciting chase, with very good contiguous editing. And here’s a 1901 film with that variation on contiguity, where the shots are connected not by an exit-entrance, but by a look:

The concept of the POV seems to be, on the whole, accepted faster and grasped more easily than the straight match on movement. Which is odd, since POV seems a more abstract concept. The same year’s SCENES FROM MY BALCONY, again by Zecca, pulls a variation on the same voyeuristic conceit.

But, As Tom Gunning points out in his excellent D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph, POVs got used in the earlies ONLY when some device like a telescope or keyhole was involved, providing a novelty matte effect. Gunning calls this the era of the cinema of attractions, and in such films the novelty vignette IS the attraction. It would be interesting to pinpoint when the plain-old optical POV becomes an accepted thing. At this point anyhow, without such context-dependant framing, the audience would be presumed to descend into helpless perplexity, and besides, what would be the attraction?

(I don’t FULLY buy into the cinema of attractions hypothesis, but that’s another story for another day.)

Some of Zecca’s bigger films from the following years, like his DON QUIXOTE and JESUS films, play like a series of tableaux separated by intertitles and sometimes decades of screen time, so there’s never any contiguity to be had. In 1905’s VENDETTA!! there are slightly more contiguous than uncontiguous edits, as if Zecca wasn’t quite sure he wanted to bother with all this newfangled stuff, but was prepared to try it out a bit. And it obviously caught his fancy because he became a vigorous proponent in later shows.

Complicating matters, here’s a 1901 film, THE SEVEN CASTLES OF THE DEVIL, which has a couple of suggestive contiguities. Of the transitions that DON’T match movements, most of them are magical, as when we dissolve to a new backdrop but with the character still in place, SHERLOCK JR style, or when people teleport in puffs of red-painted smoke or emerge from the mouth of a giant gargoyle puppet. Rules do not apply to people in love.

I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what is going on in that film but I admire all the effort.

It seems that matching movement was done more in the studio than on location. In studios at that time the camera was likely always facing the same direction (point the other way and you get lights, rigging, an enthusiastic Spanish gentleman). Go outside and everything’s confusing, as it still is today. Your eye could be drawn to all sorts of boulders, mountains, oceans, trees or ladies, causing you to point your lens at them, and then you send the actors over there and what happens happens.

Something Unusual

The two posters above do evince a certain desperation, but most film publicity does. The exclamation marks, bold print, hysterical repetition — this is not the behaviour of a confident form. But here we see perhaps more performance anxiety than usual. The change of title betrays a lack of fixity of purpose, and the decision to brand the film as “something unusual” suggests uncertainty, just as the CITIZEN KANE poster’s “It’s terrific!” conveys less a filmmaker’s bold artistic achievement, more an advertising man’s helpless confusion. Maybe a film poster with HOW DO I SELL THIS? would result in a hit, as a piece of Stan Freberg type honesty in advertising?

MORITURI or “MORITURI” or THE SABOTEUR: CODENAME – “MORITURI” is no KANE, but it’s a lot better than I was expecting, never having learned to love director Bernhard Wicki as much as director Bernhard Wicki loves skin blemishes. Aided immeasurably by cinematographer Conrad Hall he gloats and glories at and in Trevor Howard’s extravagantly cratered mug, then revels in the scars, creases and skin damage of an entire shipload of players. Even Yul Brynner has never looked so pitted — he has little crevasses at the left corner of his mouth not normally perceived by the camera. Brando seems to sprout a great bump on his forehead whenever he furrows his brow, though it vanishes whenever he unwrinkles himself, some kind of subcutaneous continuity error. Maybe an alternative title could be ON THE WARTY FRONT.

The plot is all about rubber, which seems a hopeless premise — the Brits want to capture a big shipment of NAZI RUBBER and they need German pacifist Brando (good accent) so get on board in disguise and disable the scuttling devices, small bombs planted all over the craft. That’s the plot. I would say it’s not easy to care about a ship full of rubber, but that wouldn’t really be true. It’s impossible to care about a ship full of rubber. MacGuffin as verfremdungseffekt, an alienation device at the heart of the plot, and one not susceptible to defusing. It is of course possible to care about Brando and other characters whose fates become intertwined with this rubbery cargo, and I did to some small extent.

The film looks great — early on, Hall lights some studio scenes meant to be set in India in a very odd way — twigs cast pin-sharp shadows on the actors in a way that trees in daylight never do. But once we’re on board this real ship it gets terrific, especially in the engine room. Vertiginous angles and near-expressionist concatenations of ducts, pipes, wiring, walkways, hatches, dials, levers, bulbs, scary and oppressive metallic intestines that keep Hall’s nimble camera dancing from one jagged, lurching composition to another.

There’s also an unusual — that word again — early score by Jerry Goldsmith which is very nice.

The one extraneous or problematic element is Janet Margolin as a Jewish prisoner picked up from a sunken ship. It’s a zesty performance, maybe a little too much so. But the character is someone we can really care about, more than a hold full of rubber. The film doesn’t seem to realise this, though, or thinks that her narrative purpose should be to be tortured, to torture the audience and thus make us take this thing seriously. It ended up making me feel a bit sick. Daniel CASTLE KEEP Taradash and Walon THE WILD BUNCH Green are implicated.

With a better story, this could have been really excellent, but thanks to the intersection of Hall and that ship, it’s very watchable, a waste of Brando’s talents arguably but one which allows him to vault about in a tight jumper. A rehearsal for LAST TANGO, then.

MORITURI stars 1st Lt. Fletcher Christian; Rameses; Ellie Fabian; Captain William Bligh; Thomas Mann; Maj. Werner Pluskat; Mr. Robinson J. Peepers; Uncle Max; Grand Admiral Erich Raeder; Harding; Brain Control; Jules Verne; Joseph Goebbels; Emcee at Frankenstein’s Show; Von Ellstein; Dr. Charles Forbin; Horst; and Sulu.