Swapsies

I’m sure I referred to the amusing titles of Peter Ustinov’s VICE VERSA years ago, but I can’t find the reference and so I’m guessing neither can you. Here we go:

The titles are presented as a slideshow complete with clunky transitions and mistakes. Ustinov’s celebrated wit is much in evidence, and it’s all very charming as well as funny. Better than the film, in fact, which is also good.

It used to be a truism that film’s with brilliant opening titles were always disappointing. This one is only a tiny bit disappointing. The pace is a little off and there are almost too many comic ideas to do justice to. Master Anthony Newley the child wonder is amazing though.

This is almost certainly Ustinov’s finest film as director — the year is 1948, possibly the peak of British cinema’s post-war creative boom, when even the minor filmmakers were often doing amazing work, as if creativity was in the air and they were breathing it in. The wild impulses of people like Powell & Pressburger were mainstream, part of the accepted stylistic palette directors and writers were expected to dip into. If you’re a British filmmaker today, you kind of have to be an outsider to be of any interest because the palette around you is hopelessly muddy. If you’re an American filmmaker, the problem is more to do with the acceptable story structures and character arcs, which have a way of turning even really interesting aesthetics into junk, because even a really inventive audiovisual idea at the service of banal material is going to come off as mediocre.

The other golden period for British film is circa 63-73, a remarkable run. There ought to have been another good bit in the intervening years but I’m not sure I can identify it. Suggestions welcome.

Back to VICE VERSA. Here’s a gallery:

Asides from Newley, James Robertson Justice makes a great early impression (all his previous roles since ’44 are small ones), Petula Clark is winning, Peter Jones as a superannuated school bully is great, a fellow named David Hutcheson is a great cad. Roger Livesey, who we worship, is maybe part of the pace problem, but he supplies a strong set of Blimpish characteristics for Newley to mimic (the plot is the old one about father and son switching places, this time via an Indian idol’s eye stolen from North of Kathmandu).

We double-billed it with the comparable retro-farce of ON APPROVAL, which is REALLY good.

Crime Jazz

JAZZ BOAT, seen and enjoyed and wondered at thanks to Talking Pictures TV. Ken Hughes directed this boggling jazz musical crime comedy thriller, a star vehicle for Anthony Newley, who pretends he’s a master thief knows as The Cat, and gets mixed up with a criminal biker gang led by James Booth. Every scene depending on the anticipation of violence between these two “toughs” cracked me up.

Booth’s gang also features David Lodge in a beard and specs that make him resemble Nick Frost — his character, Holy Mike, is a kind of ironic religious maniac in black. Added muscle is provided by Al Muloch from the openings of THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, as a real gone thug, maybe the most substantial part of his tragically shortened career. And then they’ve got Bernie Winters as back-up, and busty Anne Aubrey as “the Doll,” whose going with Booth but somehow can’t keep her hands off Newley. He must have had something, I suppose.

“He was quite good as the Artful Dodger,” admits Fiona.

“With a walnut up his nose,” I remark.

“What?”

“A walnut.”

“WHAT?”

“He played the part of the Artful Dodger with a walnut up his nose.”

“WHAT?”

“Anthony Newley. Played the Artful Dodger. With a-“

“Whose idea was that?”

“David Lean’s, I suppose.”

“But that’s child abuse!”

“No it isn’t. Kids love shoving things up their noses.”

“But it might have gotten lodged, and gone deeper…”

“Well they could just have got… Mark Lester to go in after it.”

“Why Mark Lester???”

“Well, he was little…”

“But he was in a different film. He was in OLIVER!”

“Oh yeah… Well, that’s ideal. He’d have been REALLY little…”

Shoving aside the thought of an unborn Mark Lester being injected up Anthony Newley’s nostril in some grotesque nasal parody of FANTASTIC VOYAGE, we return to JAZZ BOAT. Lionel Jeffries plays a tough police inspector, and this oddball casting works great, because he’s a really good actor. All the oddball casting is defensible except that Newley and Booth are the same type, and Newley can’t suggest his character’s innocence.

The film opens in Chislehurst Caves where Ted Heath and his Band are playing and we meet all the characters, and a fight breaks out.

Then there is some quite decent storytelling where we see how Newley gets mistaken for the Cat, and how he’s honest, really, and then gets roped into doing a crime with Spider’s gang.

There is, eventually, a jazz boat, but it has little to do with the plot. Within minutes, it seems, the film is showing us Newley in drag trying to escape the gang’s revenge, then showing Booth and poor Aubrey slashing each other with razors. Then the boat docks at Margate and we may remember the Archers’ bit of doggerel about that town, and there’s a chase through Dreamland, the funfair immortalised by Lindsay Anderson in his free cinema documentary — a film which now looks a bit worrisome in its aghast depiction of working-class entertainment.

We never find out who the real Cat is, which seems like a big loose end. But then, this whole film, handsomely shot by Ted Moore with Nic Roeg operating, is a giant, marvelous blunder, a skull-throbbing offense against taste and tone and logic and genre — put together by professionals, so the bits don’t quite fall apart even though they might do better if they did.

I really want to see IN THE NICK now, made the same year of our Lord 1960 by mostly the same culprits, many with the same character names, but it doesn’t seem to be available anywhere.

JAZZ BOAT stars Heironymous Merkin; Prof. Joseph Cavor; Pvt. Henry Hook; Jelly Knight; Knuckles; and Clang.

Sammy Going Sideways

I’ve always tried to convert my unseemly love for CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG (not pictured) into a wider admiration for director Ken Hughes. but have never quite managed to see the film that will clinch it. Now, with this edition of The Forgotten, I at last have done so.

THE SMALL WORLD OF SAMMY LEE.