Nerve

Having worn down our resistance a bit, George Formby more or less wowed us with NO LIMIT, rumoured to be his best film. Thanks to Mark Fuller for the recommendation.

It’s George’s first film for Ealing after leaving the no-budget Mancunian Films, and the slapstick pattern of his later movies is not quite hardened into habit. One of its advantages is a more grounded sense of working-class life. George’s usually offscreen mum (source of one catchphrase, the cri de coeur “Mother!”) is, for once, a prominent and sympathetic character, and we get a grumpy grandpa too, sharing a little house with the two.

A singsong in a train carriage shows a friendly, cheery view of working class life, though the bit players are also borderline grotesque. Hard to tell if this is an inclusive celebration of normies, or a bit of seaside postcard comic grotesquerie. George is a TT racer aspiring to take part in the notoriously dangerous Isle of Man race, and there’s some pointed class enmity with toffee-nosed rival racer Howard Douglas.

What’s usually missing in ABC films is gag construction and visual inventiveness. For once, George has a director with some talent in this area, former silent comedian Monty Banks, and as a result the bike racing and crashing is put over with real gusto and more than a little menace to life and limb. One spectacular skid takes bike, driver and movie camera out of the picture in a wince-inducing smash.

Formby is on form as ever, and not quite as childish and simple-minded as he’d become. Florence Desmond is a good romantic interest for him — her journey from finding him ridiculous, to sympathising, to admiring, to love, is about as convincing as we’re ever going to get with a leading man like George.

Banks serves up two impressive action sequences, the race itself (thrills! spills! near-kills!) and an earlier practice run in which George’s bike refuses to stop and gradually falls apart as he hurtles helplessly round the track — accelerated POV shots make this authentically hair-raising or maybe hare-racing.

Things get interesting when this near-death nonjoyride leaves George with PTSD and he wants to abandon racing. He also accepts a bribe to stay out of the race, which puts him in morally questionable ground.

Moments of unease: we didn’t spot the swastikas, but apparently they’re somewheres about — the Germans had a team at the 1934 race. And then Desmond gets George to don minstrel-show makeup to raise lodging money by performing with his banjolele on the beach. Blackface minstrels are terrifying, as TV’s The League of Gentlemen understood. George in blackface is the most disturbing of them all, somehow. Nothing about this sequence is charming. The simple admonition DON’T is best followed when it comes to this kind of racial burlesque.

It’s a real shame because this is otherwise a good, likeable little comedy. Suddenly it’s a whole new shade of Awful.

The Isle of Man actually looks quite nice. I’d somehow always imagined it was dreadful, an impression not dispelled by any of the tax haven/film fund movies shot there.

The pleasure of NO LIMIT led us to KEEP YOUR SEATS, PLEASE!, George’s next film with Ealing, Banks and Florence Desmond. It’s enjoyable but not as good. George sings “When I’m Cleaning Windows,” the voyeuristic smut lyrics clashing oddly with his asexual naif act elsewhere. Florence is great but the unappealing Gus MacNaughton is along for the ride too, hoovering up material she could ably have taken up. There’s also a very cute, very young kid, Binkie Stuart, a sort of Brit Shirley Temple but very naturalistic with it. A real find. And Alastair Sim is the villain, a crooked lawyer.

Plot is a variant on the old Twelve Chairs chestnut, usually performed, as here, with a mere six chairs. Twelve is too many. Episodes involve a singing instructor, a doctor, an omnivorous goat and a hypnotism act. Disguising the goat as a dog to take it on public transport leads to some pretty decent comic chaos. Dame May Whitty makes an uncredited appearance — I wonder why she chose to remain anon? Snobbery, perhaps? Like Kenneth Haigh refusing a credit on A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, convinced it’d end his career if word got out he’d done a pop musical.

Unease about Formby may be down to personal taste — he isn’t everybody’s mug of Bovril — but classism and a kind of cultural cringe may also play their parts. If one is working class — my dad’s a retired electrician, I’m a teacher, so I think I qualify — being “represented” by this toothy manchild may feel insulting. But George is, at his best, a real working-class hero.

In the Banks films, Fiona pointed out, he’s not so pathetic as he would be later: he not infrequently punches his enemies out. Perhaps having an American-Italian director liberates him from some of the later stereotyping Ealing imposed on him. KYSP definitely makes him more of a mug than NL did — he’s completely innumerate, and easily exploited and deceived by the shifty Sim and MacNaughton. A kind of regression seems to be occurring.

NO LIMIT stars George Gribble; Lady Manderley; Lord Amberley; Miss Mandrill; Lord Slade; Nobby; Duke of Monaghan; and Harry Blump, the Window Washer.

KEEP YOUR SEATS, PLEASE! stars George Gullip; Florrie Small; Commercial Traveller; Miss Amelia Fritton; Film Director Monty; Lady Henrietta Kingsclere; Binkie Slade; and Miss Froy (uncredited).

Just in time for this post, my double-disc Blu-ray of Monty Banks silent films arrived! Looking forward to digging into these.

That Uncertain Ealing

JOHNNY FRENCHMAN is a 1945 Ealing comedy-drama (dramedy? dromedary?) made to promote Anglo-French cooperation. 1945 might seem a bit late in the war for this to be needed, but films take time. Also, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH was made to promote Anglo-American cooperation and didn’t really come out until the war was ended. Michael Powell was told his film was needed, because “While we were losing we were all getting on OK. But now that we’re winning all the old resentments are coming out.”

Ealing is the studio of microcosm so they postulate two fishing villages, one Cornish and one Breton, where there’s rivalry and enmity — the French are always poaching the Brits’ crabs and so on. Tom Walls plays a harbour master and the great Francoise Rosay, who’d escaped from occupied France via North Africa and hitched a ride on a bomber, is an innkeeper and fisherwoman. Complicating matters, Walls’ daughter Patricia Roc falls for Rosay’s son Paul Dupuis (imported from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). Even the advent of war doesn’t totally clear things up between these folks, but eventually, of course, group unity, the prevailing Ealing virtue, prevails.

Written by T.E.B. (“Tibby”) Clarke (THE LAVENDER HILL MOB) and directed by Charles Frend (THE CRUEL SEA) this is very engaging, if not reaching the modest greatness of post-war Ealing. Walls is much better in character roles — he gives good performances in leading man parts, but he’s not an acceptable leading man. Vanity seems to have driven him to play dashing lovers well past the age he could pull it off. Inescapably fat and rumpled here, he’s settled into the mode than now suits him best — alas, he’d die four years later, a great loss to British movies.

(I encountered Walls as part of my research into Awful British Comedians, but I’ve yet to report properly on him. He is DNA: Definitely Not Awful.)

Walls essays what seems a creditable Cornish accent — maybe it’s not accurate, I can’t tell, but it’s consistent and sounds the part. Patricia Roc as his daughter can’t be bothered with any of that, nor can Ralph Michael as the local boy who’s wooing her. So the young folks let the side down a little. They’re less interesting than the senior characters, too, even though they ought to have all that Romeo & Juliet stuff going for them. I get the feeling working-class or regional accents were considered undesirable in romantic leads in the UK, with a few exceptions.

One of the developments at postwar Ealing is the rejection of romantic leads almost totally in their best films. Sir Michael Balcon was uncomfortable with any treatment of sex, and though the forbidden nature of the romance here provides the occasional mild thrill, it’s the sparring between Walls and Rosay that carries the interest.

Rosay is of course magnifique — wrestling with the English language seems to even improve her, since the right kind of obstructions often bring out the best in people.

Very nice location work, and the art department have done a great job transforming one Cornish village into a Breton one. There’s an egregious backdrop that’s used a little too obviously, but it hardly matters. Robert Sellers’ The Secret Life of Ealing Studios offers some amusing stories about the shoot: when Clarke was researching pilchards, one old fisherman told him, “Don’t know, m’dear. But ‘ee out in m’boat and show ‘ee a handsome bit ‘o coast for your back projection.”

Released the same year as DEAD OF NIGHT, this film doesn’t come close in terms of interest, settling for lightly likeable all down the line. A couple of people worked on both: Clarke did a dialogue polish on DON, while Ralph Michael is much more interesting in Robert Hamer’s haunted mirror story.

It’s a war picture where there’s no combat except a wrestling match, nobody dies, and there’s barely any life-or-death jeopardy except when a mine gets loose and floats into the harbour (Rosay to the rescue). This good old British restraint is interesting, and clearly deliberate. The film is very relaxing, which must have been the attempt — fresh air and mild peril as a relief from wartime tension.

Roc pool.

JOHNNY FRENCHMAN stars Laura Chapdelaine; Major Bone; Dilys; Peter Cortland; Duke of Burgundy; Kommandant Bernsdorff (The U-Boat Crew); Sister Bryony; and Shagal the Inn-Keeper.

Extra! Extra!

I’m eagerly awaiting my contributor’s copies of THE CAT AND THE CANARY and THE VALIANT ONES from Masters of Cinema, THE SCARFACE MOB and Arrow and the John Farrow box set from Imprint, but here’s Luigi Comencini’s MISUNDERSTOOD (INCOMPRESO) from Radiance. Doing a video essay for this was a great excuse to delve deeper into the director’s intermittent but obsessive tackling of the subject of childhood. After my first project for Radiance didn’t go terribly smoothly, but worked out fine in the end, it was reassuring that MISUNDERSTOOD was plain sailing all the way. A real pleasure.

STOP PRESS: and here’s THE SCARFACE MOB in my grubby hands at last. I really enjoyed digging into Comencini and Phil Karlson’s other work and their source material for these two productions. Thanks due to Laura Wiggett, who edited both of these.