Sauce

Max Miller was a legendarily popular music hall “cheeky chappie” whose appeal now seems irretrievable, alien, and who was never suited to film: his routines depend on jokes, patter and his evident rapport with the audience — smutty jokes aimed knowingly at working class mums in a style of harmless flirtation. Since film comedy isn’t about telling jokes and you can’t achieve exactly the same rapport with a movie camera (though some stars seem to manage a version of that). Nevertheless, Miller made a shit-ton of films, and shit seems to be the operative word here.

Roy William Neill, born at sea off the coast of Ireland started his career in the US and had a brief UK stint — he was at one point promised THE LADY VANISHES before Hitch got it, but hey Roy, you can have two Claude Hulberts and four Max Millers in consolation. Don’t take it to heart.

A lot of ABC films seem to be about going to Scotland — Will Hay and Old Mother Riley do it in order to be haunted. Max does it here in order to die a death on stage. Scottish music hall audiences were notoriously tough, with one known case of a comedian killing himself in Glasgow after a particularly bruising gig. Our hero comes on extremely obnoxious, constantly belittling his assistant, Chips, and feuding with a Scots comedienne, played by English Florence Desmond who was George Formby’s best leading lady (in NO LIMIT) with one of the ghastliest fake accents I ever heard. Still, you take her part against Max.

“Max Miller is the worst comedian I’ve even seen,” remarked Fiona. Yet he’s clearly skilled, the speed of his chatter is breathtaking, hard to keep up with. But he’s of another world. The references are obscure, the smut abstracted, the whole way of being alien to us. And there’s an undeniable nails-down-a-blackboard to the rapid-fire barrage of insinuating smarm. Who wears a suit made out of curtains? I think it’s also a mistake to portray Max as an egomaniacal bully offstage, since a lot of his appeal onstage seems to be his naughty-but-nice Jewish boy image.

Desmond’s act is almost as abstruse, with impersonations of Cicely Courtnidge (Mrs Jack Hulbert) and Elizabeth Bergner (!)

Neill’s strong, atmospheric visual style, as showcased in his later Sherlock Homes movies with Rathbone and Bruce, is nowhere to be seen, though it would hardly have fitted this material. But he doesn’t come up with an alternative — though surely a better copy would reveal vastly more visual quality. I wonder if any of the other Neill-Miller collaborations are haunted house films? It seems like every ABC worth his salt ‘n’ sauce had to wind up in a spookshow at some point. Askey and Hay did it every other film.

Unforgivably, neither Alastair Sim nor John Laurie appears during the Scottish scenes, but there’s a talented kid in a major role, authentically Scottish and working-class. Uncredited, of course. Otherwise, it seems to be a point of honour to employ no actual Scots.

As unsuited as Max is to film stardom, this film is a far worse vehicle than even he deserves. I seem to recall FRIDAY THE 13TH being better — not a movie in which Awful British Comedians are slaughtered by a maniac with a hunting knife, alas, but an ensemble piece where Max shares the limelight with Jessie Matthews, Ralph Richardson (!) etc.

VERDICT — Max Miller is awful, but to appreciate his gifts you probably had to see him on the stage, and be born in the south of England before 1900.

Piss and Vinegar

For some reason, even for a confused liberal like me, it’s often extremely satisfying to see a policeman protagonist smacking suspects around and GETTING ANSWERS. It’s something that seems to just work in drama, and it can even be amusing, which speaks to something dark and stupid in human nature. Also, maybe it’s pleasing because it acknowledges something we believe goes on, but which isn’t always admitted in reassuring fictions. Still, after the recent massacre in Paris, there was something satisfying about watching both of Claude Chabrol’s Inspector Lavardin films (POULET AU VINAIGRE and INSPECTEUR LAVARDIN), in which glinty, flinty Jean Poiret plays Dominique Roulet’s quirky copper (likes his eggs just so), beating up witnesses, letting killers off on a whim, stitching up those who may not be precisely guilty as charged.

“Life is absurd,” is Lavardin’s philosophy, and the films are charming and entertaining because of not despite their ethical shock factor — it’s liberating to see a character who cares nothing for the accepted rules of his profession and operates entirely according to his own sensibility. The disturbing undercurrent is the certainty that these methods ARE used, and are not so whimsically funny in real life.

Lavardin is like Kurosawa’s Sanjuro character from YOJIMBO and SANJURO, upsetting the accepted codes of his genre and being so popular doing it that an immediate sequel becomes necessary. While Kurosawa boldly cast the same actor, Tetsuya Nakadai, as Toshiro Mifune’s opponents in both films, killing him off each time, and Sergio Leone repeated this trope with Gian Maria Volonte in A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (even though FAFDM has nothing in common with SANJURO except that it’s a sequel to a version of YOJIMBO), Chabrol was not quite so shameless: he waited until Lavardin got his own TV show (Les Dossiers Secret de l’Inspecteur Lavardin) to recast ex-wife Stephane Audran.

The first film enjoys a slow, convoluted set-up, one of those things where one worries that the various dastardly characters, their dysfunctional relationships and covert schemes will never fully become clear, or that one won’t be clever or French enough to understand them. Lavardin enters quite late in the action, because the deaths don’t start until midway. It’s a familiar structure from movies like GREEN FOR DANGER or FARGO or the TV show Columbo or its antecedent, QUAI DES ORFEVRES. Whereas FARGO and Columbo show the elaborate set-up to a crime, concealing nothing, and QUAI DES ORFEVRES pretends to but keeps something up its sleeve, Lavardin’s first case echoes Inspector Cockrill’s (Launder & Gilliat wanted to star Alastair Sim in a whole series of Cockrill adventures after GREEN FOR DANGER, based on Christianna Brand’s delightful whodunnits, but the star refused to repeat himself) — we see and hear plenty, but not enough to fully understand the key elements. Then Lavardin comes along and not only catches up with us in record time despite everyone lying their heads off, he supercedes our understanding and cracks the case (and a few heads).

Enjoyable as this is (with a surprising number of plot elements from PSYCHO — crazy mother in cellar, car winched from ravine), the sequel is even better, starting as it does with a corpse on a beach (the word “PORC” etched on his chubby back). This means Lavardin is on the scene in an instant, and we discover the intricacies of the case through his beady, skeptical, humorous but reptilian eyes.

I’ve heard it suggested that Chabrol came to despise mankind or at least his characters, but this does not quite seem to me to be true. There’s a bit of Clouzot’s wry affection (seeing mankind at its worst but rather liking it anyway) and there’s also the Coen defense, that these are genre exercises and the people AREN’T REAL. The filmmakers want their rats to not only run a maze, but an obstacle course. It’s all in fun, except when it’s not.

I’ve not quite decided if Chabrol’s latter-day authorial cynicism amounts to full-scale misanthropy. He seems too jocular for that. But if you want to see traditional detective stories reinvigorated by a change of attitude in the central character, Lavardin’s your man.

To get both films you have to buy two box sets, it seems. But hey, that means more Chabrol.

The Claude Chabrol Collection – Vol. 2 [DVD]

In desperation, the pun “Poulet au Vinaigre” which means Chicken with Vinegar but also “vinegary policeman” has been substituted with the title COP AU VIN, which is easier for Brits to understand except it doesn’t really mean anything.

The Essential Claude Chabrol Vol. 1 (3 disc box set) [DVD]

Sim City

By some strange quirk, the great Edinburgh-born actor Alastair Sim seems to have spent most of his later career in the sauna. In the subject of this fortnight’s edition of The Forgotten he appears in two scenes, steaming himself in both. In ROYAL FLASH he also appears in two scenes, one of which is a magnificent Victorian Turkish bathhouse designed by Terry Marsh complete with a foot-pedal-powered brass shower for Malcolm McDowell to enjoy. Sim’s character, fully dressed in gentlemanly finery, does not look like he’s enjoying himself quite so much.

One the DVD commentary, McDowell reports meeting Sim again when he went to loop a few lines. Sim looked exhausted. “I wish I could just say a line,” he moaned. The actor had, by this time, become such a master of the stutter, the hesitation and the silent working of the jaw, that replacing a line became torture, because the words never came out in a straight line. His talent was also his torment.

I should think the hardest actor to loop would be Leonard Rossiter, though, who developed a level of wordless chuntering even more extreme than Sim’s — particularly on the sitcom Rising Damp, Rossiter would flap his gums soundlessly, or else accompanied by a high, hesitant drone like a distant mountaineer plummeting, waiting for the words to actually form, for a long time before actual speech emerged, and part of the comedy was that you never knew at what point the facial calisthenics and faraway yodel would resolve into language. Lucky, then, that he worked with Kubrick, who tried to avoid dubbing whenever possible, and a little unfortunate that Sim was paired with Lester that one time, since Lester virtually rewrote his films in the dub.

But still, it’s delightful to see Sim in a Lester comedy.

None of this has anything much to do with today’s column, the Peter O’Toole tribute edition, which is available here.

Royal Flash [Blu-ray]
Royal Flash [Blu-ray]

And meanwhile, at Apocalypse Now, The ’68 Comeback Special returns with Scout Tafoya’s take on 24 HOURS IN THE LIFE OF A WOMAN starring the great Danielle Darrieux.