Creep

“Remember,” wrote Alexei Sayle in his illustrated book Geoffrey the Tube Train and the Fat Comedian, “people once laughed at Arthur Askey, and history has proved them wrong.”

When I started this slightly masochistic project I knew I was going to have to grapple with Askey, a prime example of the popular music-hall type radio star (and an early star of British TV in the 1930s — he had to wear special makeup because John Logie Baird’s television had only thirty lines and regular human features wouldn’t be discernible. Some would say Arthur had the perfect face for the medium.

Askey’s career was long, so long that he could even appear in ROSIE DIXON, NIGHT NURSE, one of those seventies porno-comedies — this casting alone adds evidence to my theory that these films were intended to sterilise the working classes with terror. In fairness to Arthur, he had a sick wife to support, something he kept to himself. (I’m grateful to Steven McNicoll for background info.)

The film we plumped for was BACK-ROOM BOY — I have Network’s DVD of THE GHOST TRAIN but Fiona didn’t want to see that, dismissing it as boring. But then we enjoyed BRB and watched TGT after it, and it wasn’t boring at all. But if we’d watched it first we might never have looked at Askey again.

BRB is the later film. I suspect someone must have thought Askey was too abrasive in TGT, because he dials his personality down to a more acceptable level. Askey is one of those British comics whose funny looks approach the status of medical condition — I would have guessed malnutrition, but he came from a middle-class family. He’s a very small fellow with no pectoral development at all — his body just goes away. No hips either, his legs just go up inside his jacket somewhere. Pointy chin, pointy hook nose, lipless rictus grin. Hornrimmed spectacles complete the look. To avoid seeming creepy, a person with such a physical instrument at their disposal would have to work quite hard. Arthur certainly works hard, but it’s not always certain what effect he’s going for.

Looking like he did, Arthur couldn’t easily be cast as a normal person, so in BACK-ROOM BOY he has an amusing BBC job — he’s introduced marching into Broadcasting House, down important and then secret corridors, into a locked room where he dons an official scientific white coat and pulls a special console from a locked alcove, and on the hour he presses a button, beep beep beep. Then he leaves. He’s the man who does the BBC pips that chime the hour.

Arthur, in the manner of these films, has an improbably beautiful girlfriend, but she doesn’t like Arthur constantly rushing off to do his pips, so they have a break-up, and in a moment of rebellion he pips out the “shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits” melody to the world, and is hauled up before the Board. Arthur is now an avowed misogynist and wants to go somewhere free from women — so they send him to Scotland. Specifically to the lighthouse on Kelpies Island, rumoured to be haunted by a deadly mermaid.

What becomes clear is that this is one of very many knock-offs of THE GHOST TRAIN. Every comic seemed to do one — certainly Will Hay in ASK A POLICEMAN does battle with a haunted coach driven by an ‘eadless ‘orseman. And what further becomes clear is that it’s very stylishly directed. The Hay film is the work of Marcel Varnel and he’s very slick but he can’t do scary atmospherics.

BRB is directed by one Herbert Mason and he’s terrific. When Arthur looks out his lighthouse and sees a spectral figure on the rocks, it’s thrilling stuff — with a zoom-in (optical, I think) on the lightning-illuminated figure and a high-angle push-in on Arthur, whose head offers delirious possibilities for the wide angle lens.

Arthur is supposed to be all alone here but gradually a whole gang of supporting players is accumulated, and then start going missing. First there’s a little girl, the delightful and very natural Vera Frances. Then the mermaid, who turns out to be Googie Withers, working her way through every homely lead the era could offer — Hulbert, Formby, Askey, with Jack Buchanan as a bit of a relief from all that. Then a bunch of shipwrecked showgirls — IMDb doesn’t seem to know who most of them are — in the company of sailors Moore Marriot and Graham Moffat, a team more usually associated with Will Hay. When Hay decided he didn’t want to be in a trio he cut these guys loose, although pretty soon he’d get teamed up with Claude Hulbert and Charles Hawtrey, another trio. Marriott and Moffat also appeared separately with the Crazy Gang. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.

Script is by Val Guest, J.O.C. Orton and Marriott Edgar (a Scot) — together or separately they wrote tons of stuff for Askey, Will Hay, the Crazy Gang — Orton goes back to the days of Jack Hulbert.

Apart from some lecherous business — Guest was on a lifelong mission to sex up British cinema, which would eventually give us Claire Bloom and Diane Cilento and Janet Munro’s only nude scenes — thank the man nicely — and then the appalling sex romp CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER, which might cost him his space in celluloid heaven. He also made one of the last true Awful British Comedian films, BOYS IN BLUE with unfunny double act, Cannon and Ball, a loose remake of ASK A POLICEMAN but without the Scooby-Doo cod-supernatural element.

I’d never heard of Herbert Mason and many of his films are unavailable, but I’m tracking down what I can get. There’s one with Michael Redgrave and one with Tom Walls, who I’ve just discovered on this trawl and who I liked. More on him soon. It’d be interesting to know why Mason’s career never took off like Lean or Reed’s. This film shows more flair than early Reed, who is generally rather disappointing before he discovered the Deutsch Tilt.

So this inspired us to run THE GHOST TRAIN which is pretty great, but illuminated the Askey Problem. He’s intensely irritating here. But he’s meant to be, he’s a hyped-up version of himself getting on the nerves of all the other characters stuck for the night in a railway waiting room on a haunted track. So the fact that we want to throttle him isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In a Bob Hope version (which ought to have happened), the comic would annoy everybody except the leading lady and the audience. Askey takes his job to heart and annoys everyone, for generations. Most of the IMDb reviews suggest the film is great except Askey ruins it. I think he just bends it into an unexpected shape, like a cinematic funny balloon animal.

BACK-ROOM BOY came to feel like a smart course-correction, dialling back Arthur’s more grating qualities and giving him more vulnerability.

In adapting Arnold Ridley’s classic twenties play for Askey, the writers have split the hero in two, giving some of his business to his radio partner Richard “Stinker” Murdoch. This somewhat damages the structure and the ending, but one can see why Askey wouldn’t have been considered able to sustain the hero part. I’d have liked to see him try, though!

Askey, as music hall comic Tommy Gander (great name — suggests also that Trinder might have been the first intended casting) performs an irksome song with beautiful little mannered gestures, until one of his fellow railway station detainees picks up his phonograph and hurls it onto the track. This made Fiona applaud. Then Arthur picks up the chess game his enemy is playing and throws it on the fire. Tommy Gander is a psychopath.

Arthur recites his radio catchphrase “Ithangyew” on multiple occasions in both films. The only time it’s really funny is here when, faced with some horrifying information, he stammers “I-I-I…” and then, ducking for cover, finishes with the trademark line which makes no sense but is hilarious in this non-context.

Our favourites in the supporting cast were Betty Jardine and Stuart Latham as a working-class couple on their way to get married, terrified of the prospect of being forced to spend the night together. Raymond Huntley, early stage Dracula, begins his long association with ABCs (always as ill-natured authority figure) here — he’d work with Will Hay the same year, then much later go up against Jimmy Edwards, Charlie Drake and Norman Wisdom.

Walter Forde, a proper director when he’s on form, does a great job with the comedy, the thriller spook stuff, and sustaining visual interest in the potentially stagey set-up. It’s a masterclass in dynamic blocking. His cinematographer is Hitchcock’s man, Jack E. Cox, who did lots of these things after his main director went stateside. This is one of the few that allows him lots of room for shadowy atmosphere.

Inevitable moment of discomfort: Askey ponders teaching a parrot to say “Heil Hitler!” then reflects that it wouldn’t be suitable, “Not with a beak like that.” But Val Guest was Jewish so I guess he’s allowed to write stuff like that.

The best version of this is still the Anglo-German silent DE SPOOKTREIN, a classic. The 1931 Jack Hulbert version is partly lost, but the surviving scenes demonstrate that the spectacular wrecking scene in the Askey is stock footage culled from the Hulbert. Also, the early thirties lack of music and atmosphere rather leaves both comedy and suspense hanging in the wind.

Arnold Ridley, who wrote the play, was a remarkable chap — known to generations of Brits as Private Godfrey from sitcom Dad’s Army. When I interviewed his co-star, the late Ian Lavender, for the Blu-ray of Buster Keaton’s THREE AGES (Lavender was a great Keaton fan and played him on the stage) he recalled Ridley and John Laurie going into very quiet discussions, and you knew not to disturb them, you knew they were talking about their time in the Great War… Ridley was not only bayonetted and knocked unconscious, leaving him prone to blackouts for years afterwards, he was interrogated by his own side in case he was malingering, and then presented with a white feather by a woman on the street when he was out of uniform. And then he reenlisted in 1939 — and wouldn’t even talk about his WWII service, it was so horrific.

Although Scooby-Doo plots — THE GHOST BREAKER/S etc — existed before Ridley’s play, it’s clearly the direct inspiration for a whole sub-sub-genre of British comedy — Awful British Comedian battles ghosts who turn out to be Bolsheviks/Nazis/smugglers/IRA gun-runners/what-have-you. A trope continued long past the point it could have fooled anyone, there’s ALWAYS a rational explanation. But the two Askey versions still make this rusty mechanism work, and if you’re never convinced by the phantasmal backstories, they do guddle the plot up to a point where you have no idea what’s going on.

BACK-ROOM BOY stars Arthur Linden; Harbottle; Albert; Helen Nosseross; Brownie; Helen Hawkins; William Shakespeare; Ned Horton; and Dick Turpin.

THE GHOST TRAIN stars Arthur King; Cmdr. Bissham-Ryley; Mrs Sowerberry; Fee Baker; Corporal Philpotts; Sir Ensor Doone; Sir Thomas Erpingham; Joseph Whemple; and Miss Blandish.

Verdict: Askey has definite awful aspects, but they CAN be used for good.

Berk

There was a young chappie named Trinder

Who was very near burned to a cinder

Escaping the flame

He undraped a young dame

But she wouldn’t give in so he chinned ‘er.

OK, none of the above is true, but Tommy Trinder does get incinerated in Ealing drama THE BELLS GO DOWN, and he did have a prominent chin, in the Jack Hulbert mould.

Trinder, cheeky chappie, a once-popular entertainer from whose spell Britain long ago awakened. This is no great loss, however. He’s quite annoying. I can overlook reports of him being a shit to work with, but he’s a bit of a shit to watch also. Still, a few of his films may be of interest. I keep failing to watch CHAMPAGNE CHARLIE, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti of all people. Because who better to celebrate the history of the English music hall than a queer Brazilian artist with a training in law and architecture? This season or blogathon or whatever it is ought to force me to rectify that gap in my viewing, but instead I found myself gazing upon FIDDLERS THREE.

I should probably have started with SAILORS THREE, which teams TT’s prognathous jaw with Claude Hulbert (also long faced) and Michael Wilding, who both have a bit of charm. Walter Forde, a skilled specialist in British comedies (eg THE GHOST TRAIN) and a music hall man himself, directed that one. FIDDLERS THREE reworks the trio to include Diana Decker as a pert WAC, and Sonnie Hale — a crumpled gurner who somehow was Mr. Jessie Matthews. Jessie was an East End cockney pretending to be posh, while he was a toff from Kensington essaying a mockney accent. I guess they met in the middle.

The plot of this one drew me, though — a thunderstorm at Stonehenge at midnight on midsummer’s night transports two sailors and a WAC back in time to Roman Britain. Imported to Rome they tangle with Nero and Poppaia. Scotsman Harry Watt directed this nonsense — clearly inspired by ROMAN SCANDALS, which it directly references (“We’ve had a visitor from your century before, a Mr. Eddie Cantor”), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court before that, and anticipating the Roman farce and anachronisms of CARRY ON CLEO and Up Pompeii. We get lavish sets with clever matte paintings — the establishing shot is VERY reminiscent of the one in Keaton’s THREE AGES (comparison below, Keaton on the right).

The songs, some of them extremely smutty, feature lyrical contributions from Robert Hamer, previously an editor for Trinder and Formby and a coming man at the time. Notoriously somewhat depraved, he gives us a number called “Sweet Fanny Adams,” a barely-double entendre every enlightened adult would have got as a euphemism for “sweet fuck-all.” Frequent Hitchcock collaborator Angus MacPhail (I think Hitch must have just LIKED him because I can’t convince myself that he was really very good) co-scripts with Diana Morgan, known at Ealing as “the Welsh bitch” — Ealing could be a pretty toxic boys’ club.

Francis L. Sullivan is Nero, perfect (he must’ve gotten flashbacks to his role in the unfinished Von Sternberg I CLAUDIUS), and Frances Day is Poppaea, quite an interesting actor it seems — she was Anthony Eden’s mistress (before he was p.m.) and threw herself at nonagenarian George Bernard Shaw. Trinder describes Poppaea as “the original glamour girl,” and that was Day’s nickname too.

She’s assisted by the mighty Elisabeth Welch, who also gets a song.

It’s full of oddball ’40s references to Wee Georgie Wood and No Orchids for Miss Blandish which ought to baffle most modern viewers (I’m different), and which climax with Trinder dragging up as a big-chinned Carmen Miranda, which is admittedly pretty hysterical. He’s enjoying himself so, so much. Trinder was famous for his egotism and self-promotion, which was only partly a bit. I guess it’s the same with Trump or Shatner — you can make a joke out of your arrogance, while still holding tight to it. But comedy comes from weakness, and Tommy is too much the ubermensch here.

Make sure you watch up to the instrumental break and dance.

Trinder is surprisingly heroic in this — there would be ample opportunities to display comic cowardice, but he’s having none of it. He does look like a leading man, but distorted by a funhouse mirror. The comedy is derived from wisecracking, dragging up, and anachronism. All of which are fine, but don’t result in a very strong persona for Tommy.

Surprisingly, the film doesn’t opt for an it-was-all-a-dream ending, continuing to insist that lightning bolts cause time travel, as in BACK TO THE FUTURE, and that Stonehenge is a big time machine, but it fizzles out at the end anyway. There’s some mild peril with a christians-lions rematch at the climax, but our heroes don’t have anything to accomplish in the past except surviving, so the thing’s flimsiness catches up with it.

Ealing made intermittent attempts to use Trinder in straight dramas, but this doesn’t seem to work — he sticks out like a sore chin in BELLS GO DOWN and I can’t imagine him working better in Australian pioneer drama BITTER SPRINGS. CHAMPAGNE CHARLIE will be the test…

FIDDLERS THREE stars Tommy Turk; La Mome; Victor; Philip Nosseross; Jean Farlow; Mrs Wu; Baroness Athona; The White Rabbit; One-Round; and Lord Scrumptious.

VERDICT: Tommy Trinder seems to have been awful irl. Onscreen his tendency towards smarm undercuts his apparently impressive affinity with live audiences. Sonnie Hale has no particular redeeming qualities.

Box (Karl) Brown(ies)

I’m indebted to Kristin Thompson & (the late) David Bordwell’s wonderful blog for the above discovery. I loved it at the time, then forgot what the Griffith short was called, then was reminded of it in my recent researches. Kristin’s original post is here.

Obviously this is a great illustration of what Thompson & Bordwell call “contiguity editing” a phrase I have taken up with pleasure because it’s the only name we have for just this one particular thing — the construction of cinematic space from a series of bits of space that are presented as being next to one another, the connection being formed by the continuous left-right/right-left/up-down/down-up movements of characters from one shot to another.

The film (original version here) also captures Griffith’s boxy technique of the period, which he applied to a lot of his work and which you see in just about everyone else’s work too: one room = one shot.

I found a very nice article by Barry Salt, DW Griffith Shapes Slapstick, in the collection Slapstick Comedy edited by Tom Paulus and Rob King. Saly doesn’t use the term “contiguity” but he talks about how Griffith liked to construct his interiors out of a series of shots all filmed frontally, like the view into a dollhouse or through a theatre proscenium. Since Mack Sennett began in movies as an actor for Griffith, he and others adopted Griffith’s technique when he started directing himself and then hired others to do it for him (and do it better than he could).

One of Sennett’s most talented stars, notes Salt, was Roscoe Arbuckle, who then started directing for himself and trained Buster Keaton. And in Keaton we see the box approach taken to new and unsurpassed heights. The particular example Salt uses, of course, is THE HIGH SIGN, which eventually pulls back to treat its main set exactly as a dollhouse, with no splitscreen techniques required. I’d like to see an experimental film like Aitor Gametxo’s VARIATION ON “A SUNBEAM” which takes the climax of THE HIGH SIGN as its raw material.

When he made THE SUNBEAM, Griffith had only just started playing with closeups and inserts — THE LONEDALE OPERATOR in 1911 features an insert of a wrench, a detail shot we need to see so that we can understand that the wrench has been used as a pretend handgun. Lillian Gish describes Griffith shooting his first closeup on an actor’s face to establish that one thief is beginning to mistrust another. This SOUNDS like a bit of action from the same film, but no such closeup appears. Gish also describes Griffith arguing with his producer about it, so maybe Griffith lost that argument and the footage was also lost, on some cutting room floor in a building that is itself lost to history.. But it seems quite likely that the idea of interpolating big faces into a story came after the idea of featuring a significant prop which the audience needed to recognise.

The criminous closeup may yet turn up in my viewing of other films from this period — hobosploitation was a big part of Griffith’s oeuvre.

In the absence of constructive editing which breaks up a scene into medium and close shots, and in the absence of any expressionistic idea of using artsy camera angles to give scenes an emotional inflection, Griffith’s one room = one shot approach reigned supreme. And the contiguity approach pioneered in Brighton and Paris, which spread to America via Edwin S. Porter and Wallace McCutcheon at Edison dictated that those rooms HAD to be shot from effectively the same angle so the shots would match up. And so the dollhouse approach can be seen as a result of other forces at play rather than as a deliberate stratagem — until it became one, either in the Keaton or, if you prefer, much earlier (how much did Griffith think about his contiguous box construction?)

A nice thing in Karl Brown’s book Adventures with D.W. Griffith — towards the start of his career, Griffith took to hammering nails into the studio floor to mark the bottom corners of the movie frame. He would then stretch a cord or ribbon between the two, and his actors would thus know exactly where they could walk — cross that line and we won’t see your feet. Venture beyond either of the ribbon’s ends and you’ll be offscreen. This was hailed at the time as a great contribution to cinema — as Kevin Brownlow notes in a tart footnote, it was not an innovation Griffith went on about much later. But it shows him thinking about that boxy frame.