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.
“Gee, I shout all the way through this picture.” ~ Steve Martin, on rewatching THE JERK.
Will Hay might not be such an Awful British Comedian. He has his wearing qualities, but he’s undoubtedly a skilled character man, and the films aren’t all bad. Some of them even seem like proper films.
Hay was immensely popular, but then so was Norman Wisdom, so that doesn’t get him out of trouble necessarily. He was well enough known for Michael Redgrave to attempt a brief impersonation in THE LADY VANISHES, without anyone pausing to wonder how this would play in the US.
Hay began as a Fred Karno comic, postdating Chaplin and Laurel, He was a man of many parts, an amateur astronomer who discovered or anyway confirmed the spot on Saturn.
Hay’s heyday was in the late thirties to the early fifies, same as George Formby’s. Hay’s stuff is more sophisticated, there’s some mild satire in there. Unlike Formby and Wisdom, who amused children by personating them, Hay amused children and adults by playing a very stupid adult, a man who at least knows that he’s supposed to be adult, supposed to know things, have dignity, etc. He played officious authority figures too incompetent to actually project any real authority.
Hay does not exactly have a funny face. Homely, yes. A popular radio comedian, his first feature, RADIO PARADE OF 1935 reveals him with an austere crew cut that makes him look like Boris Karloff in THE BLACK CAT. Karloff could do comedy but he did not have a face for fun. Hay’s later floppy little fringe and pince-nez emphasised his twit aspect, and probably made it easy for him to go unrecognized in public. Lose the specs, stop scowling, adjust his hair and he’d be fairly anonymous.
Hay’s career straddles the two major makers of Awful British Comedian films, Gainsborough and Ealing, both of whom are better know for other stuff — costume pictures and delightful little comedies starring proper actors.
We first ran OH, MISTER PORTER! (1937), a popular early entry, a knock-off of Arnold Ridley’s THE GHOST TRAIN, filmed directly three times and ripped off several more. A Scooby-Doo plot of fake haunting as cover for a gun-smuggling ring. Cue fight in warehouse.
Hay, as a stuffy and inept branch manager of a Northern Irish railway station, is actually part of a trio here. He’d co-starred with Graham Moffat, a chubby youth who initially played schoolboys, always called Albert, in WHERE THERE’S A WILL, WINDBAG THE SAILOR and GOOD MORNING, BOYS! Now the duo was joined by Moore Marriott. Moffat was a child who kept on playing children after he’d grown up, whereas Marriott was a young man who kept playing old men after he got old. His stylisation and makeup (Irish beard, blacked-out teeth) didn’t change no matter how close in years he got to the relics he was portraying. Here he’s younger than me.
All three are gifted clowns. Hay is very broad, and if he has a vice it’s shouting. It’s natural that he should do it, his character is a parody of the petty jobsworths known and hated throughout Britain. But it can be wearing. Marriott can match him bellow for bellow, just in a higher octave. The one bit of truly brilliant filmmaking in OMP comes when, during a steam chase wherein the cast have been bellowing doubletalk at each other for what feels like ten minutes, screeching over the incessant clatter of their locomotive, ubiquitous French helmer Marcel Varnel cuts to a station office in sudden, shocking silence. It’s a genuinely dazzling moment, but it has nothing to do with comedy.
But apparently this went down a storm at the CInematheque when Bertrand Tavernier screened it, the French delighted to see one of their own triumphing in a damp climate. Subtitling would have helped, though I pity whoever had the job.
Varnel, co-director of CHANDU THE MAGICIAN (he did the bad bits, I think) — ah, the Lugosi connection again! — made a lot of movies with Hay, Formby, the Crazy Gang and others. He has a kind of anti-gift for visual gags, framing too close (an obsessive flaw of 30s and 40s comedy — even Preston Sturges, a sincere lover of slapstick, shoots it as if it were dialogue) and cutting too often and in exactly the worst places. But there are laughs here. The prolonged “thrilling” chase seems to have become a staple, though Formby was already trying for Big Finishes in his own gawky way.
My favourite aspect of this film was Graham Moffat, because he’s relatively understated, the opposite of what you expect child comedians to be. I suppose his fat and sleepy qualities excused him from overacting. In a way he’s sort of exhibiting himself rather than feeling obliged to give a performance. He retired to run a pub, but would make a comeback whenever asked, even cropping up in MOTHER RILEY MEETS THE VAMPIRE. Hay seems to have gotten fed up sharing screen time with Marriott and Moffat, and broke up the act, saying he had no wish to be one third of a three-legged race. But his subsequent films tend to paste him together with twit Claude Hulbert, and another superannuated schoolboy, Charles Hawtrey, so he never really escaped the ensemble. He’s not quite the kind of comic who can carry a whole film surrounded by straight stooges — you need supporting clowns.
We ran THE GHOST OF ST MICHAEL’S because it’s set in Scotland and has Hulbert and Hawtrey as well as Raymond Huntley and John Laurie — British cinema’s resident Gloomy Scot, who recites the ghostly legend, a role he also undertook in OLD MOTHER RILEY’S GHOSTS. Will plays an inept schoolteacher (his most frequent guise) uncovering a Nazi spy in a Gothic castle schoolhouse. Interesting to see Ealing try for a Universal horror look. Fiona liked this better. There are delightfully crappy tabletop miniatures (other Hay films have more ambitious VFX) and there’s less shouting. Hay seems to have had an affinity for terror — all three comics get trapped in an infernal chamber with a Fu Manchu descending ceiling. Quite a bit of shouting there.
Hawtrey is a genuinely uncanny figure. Emaciated and VERY camp, he specialised in schoolboys for decades (he even wanders through shot in Hitchcock’s SABOTAGE) despite being seemingly born with a nonagenarian’s voice. As a sort of pixilated queen he became a CARRY ON regular in later life, in which context hilarity was conjured by having him compete romantically with Kenneth Williams (a queen of the more acid variety) for the hand of fat lady Hattie Jacques. A very British form of absurdism.
Realising that Hay co-directed two films with Basil Dearden, a proper director, I had to try one. I ended up watching both. THE GOOSE STEPS OUT used to be seen as a bit of a classic, but has faded into obscurity. The addition of Dearden as director makes an immediate obvious difference: though Varnel is quite smooth and elegant in his movements, with Dearden we get proper dramatic camera angles. Hay plays an officious twit of a schoolteacher (again) with an accidental resemblance to a Nazi spy. British Intelligence, who number the great John Williams (DIAL M FOR MURDER) among their ranks, parachute him behind enemy lines to replace his likealook teaching Hitler Youth to pass for British, with his secret mission being to steal an experimental Gas Fire Bomb. The Hitler Youth include Barry Morse of Space: 1999, a willowy young Peter Ustinov, and the inevitable Charles Hawtrey.
Best scene is Hay teaching the Hitlerjugend British mannerisms, witless stuff really but somehow very gratifying — fascism reduced to the ridiculous. Most Hay films have a setpiece lesson where he has to witter on about something he knows nothing about. This is a rogue variant as he’s spewing deliberate misinformation. There’s a very prolonged aeroplane climax with non-convincing but eager effects work from Roy Kellino. Special effects are never as good as real stunts (models don’t understand about timing), but none of this stuff could have been done full-scale (they nearly do a GORGO on Big Ben), except turning the plane interior upside down, which they have fun with.
The film is fainthearted in its antifascism — none of the Nazis is killed, proving my earlier point (see THE CAMELS ARE COMING) that cold-blooded comic murder was reserved for non-whites.
Or almost: MY LEARNED FRIEND, Hay’s last film, made in ’43 but set before the war to excuse it having no wartime references, is a comedy of murder, a real precursor of Ealing’s KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS and THE LADYKILLERS. Hay departs from his usual character, playing a crooked barrister, inept certainly but possessed of a certain low vegetable cunning. His mark is Claude Hulbert, hired to prosecute him, fired for failing to secure a conviction, and then lured into business with the erstwhile accused.
But a dissatisfied former client is after Hay — he’s played by Mervyn Johns in a rehearsal for his psychopathic act in DEAD OF NIGHT (which was Dearden again, among others). Johns’ psycho explains he’s bumping off the six people he blames for his conviction, and he’s saving Hay for last. So the duo rush about trying and failing to save the other entries on the kill list. Surprisingly, these are not played by notable guest stars, but we do get a substantial cameo from Ernest Thesiger as a lunatic, and an insubstantial one from the reliably dwarfish Ian Wilson.
What’s impressive here, apart from Hay finding a new way to use his air of seediness, is the sheer nastiness of the comedy. One victim is done in with a tiger trap created by Thesiger with the murderer’s connivance — a POV shot shows not only a fatal drop but spikes at the bottom. Remove that and you’d simply have an amusing trapdoor demise. With it, the thing becomes painful and frightening.
Another victim is a gangster, ‘Safety’ Wilson, known by that nickname because he slashes up victims with a safety razor embedded in a cosh, a device that gets its own bloodcurdling closeups. It feels so worryingly specific it must have been in the newspapers at the time, part of the tabloid press’s usual panics about social disorder. It’s not remotely amusing, but it’s impressively grim.
For his penultimate crime, Johns plans to blow up the House of Lords (!), which leads to a Harold Lloyd type cliffhanger on the face of Big Ben — “borrowed” by the ’78 remake of THE 39 STEPS. This kind of thing never quite works with process shots, but Michael Relph’s sets are impressive and the comic terror of the protags is amusing. It feels oddly too innocent a climax to a comedy of murder (Dearden would attempt another homicide farce, THE GREEN MAN, but got removed from it — why, I wonder?)
I remember reading about the scene in, I think, Millar and Reisz’s book The Technique of Film Editing. To get the laugh to work when Hay & Hulbert rush through a door and find themselves teetering on a platform below the clockface and above the city, the editor (Charles Hasse – DEAD OF NIGHT) discovered he had to revert to the non-continuity style of early 1900s cutting — inside the clock tower, we watch them rush through the door — cut to exterior — and the door OPENS AGAIN and they RUSH THROUGH AGAIN. The repetition was essential, he felt, to create audience anticipation and therefore suspense.)
Ill health sadly forced Hay into retirement after this one. It’s tempting to wonder what he might have gotten up to in post-war cinema, but it’s also possible that losing this big earner pushed Ealing into making less comedian-centred comedies. It’s curious that, while the War generally raised the ambitions of everyone making movies in Britain, Ealing didn’t hit their stride until a few years after peace broke out.
Verdict: Will Hay is Not Actually Awful, and I can even see myself watching the other films in my purchased-on-a-whim box set.
STOP PRESS: already chalked up ASK A POLICEMAN and HEY! HEY! USA! and both are of interest. Stay tuned.
Jack Hulbert is a somewhat atypical awful British comedian. Less awful than some, it’s more his undistinguished films that drag him down. He fits the Matthew Sweet formulation of looking like a human being reflected in a tap, but more precisely he looks like an inept drawing of a handsome man. While the stereotypical hero is supposed to have a lantern jaw, the Hulbert chin is more like a melted candle or perhaps a stalactite. Disturbing in a frontal view it surprises with an outward curve when viewed in profile, like its gotten caught in a mechanism. Like most chins, you can’t see it from the back, his neck’s in the way, and this is perhaps a blessing. Who knows what it’d get up to in a dorsal elevation.
THE CAMELS ARE COMING is a title that brings a smile to my lips, which the film itself rarely manages. It’s not totally cringe, though. Hulbert can do a parody of stiff-upper-lip acting which is quite winning. Rather than being a low-status chump man-child like Formby or Wisdom later on, or a smutty imp like Max Miller or Arthur Askey, Hulbert is more of a twit or silly ass. In his more sympathetic moments he can get you thinking how awkward it must have been to be a posh idiot, automatically placed in a position of power and responsibility by dint of race and birthright that you’re totally unequipped to handle. Then you reflect that there may be better people to feel sorry for in this situation.
TCAC has one thing most Awful British Comedian movies don’t have, which is production values, considerable location shooting having been accomplished in Egypt. It’s inspiring to see Hulbert, in blackface, patrolling the same historic sites Peter Ustinov and Mia Farrow would breeze through in DEATH ON THE NILE. History! The war would put a stop to this kind of foreign entanglement, and most ABCs are men of the sound stage or back lot almost exclusively.
Interesting credits — Tim Whelan, one of the team of piano-movers responsible for directing THIEF OF BAGDAD, is credited here, but the more interesting Robert Stevenson is his uncredited co-helmer. His KING SOLOMON’S MINES and NON-STOP NEW YORK and THE MAN WHO CHANGED HIS MIND are an Imperial ton of fun.
The fact that this is — maybe — an actual adaptation and spoof of a Biggles novel makes a lot of sense. What doesn’t make sense is that there’s nobody called Biggles in it and original author W.E. Johns gets no credit. I now learn that The Camels are Coming was the very first Biggles book in 1932. Already by 1934 considered too ridiculous to be played straight. Or, as seems possible, maybe they just stole the title. But the movie is about a heroic (but silly) British aviator, pretty much a Biggle parody. (The book derives its title from the Sopwith Camel, as also flown by Snoopy — but the filmmakers were right, it’s clearly a comedy title, even if you don’t immediately get the pun on The Campbells are Coming — which the soundtrack obligingly points out.)
Like CITIZEN KANE this begins with a fake newsreel. There, it’s fair to say, the resemblance ends. Hulbert’s ass or arse character has elements in common with Clouseau — you get the impression he knows he’s a nit, but is not smart enough to know everyone else knows it too, so he has to put on a front to try and keep his incompetence a secret. A man in hell.
Because Hulbert (whose more distorted brother Claude played silly ass Algie in several BULLDOG DRUMMOND pics) looks more like a travesty of a leading man, less like a genetic throwback to amphibian times, the problem of how to pair him with a convincing leading lady is less hideously awkward than it would be with Formby (who, improbably, co-starred with the gorgeous Googie Withers, Kay Walsh, Phyllis Calvert, Linden Travers, Kathleen Harrison and Elizabeth Allen). The decorous Anna Lee is cast opposite Jack. Her main technique is to grin amusedly in closeup and then be merely smiling, lips closed, when we cut to the wide shot. A fine method if you can master it. She’s winning, but it’s not certain she can act. She’d have to get in with John Ford to prove that.
Hulbert is a proper posh boy — educated at Winchester and Cambridge (a Cambridge footlight, like several Pythons, though it was a rather different outfit in his day). He appears in ELSTREE CALLING but likely missed being directed by Hitchcock. He seems to have been a decent chap. Married for many years to Cicely Courtnidge, who sometimes co-starred with him. He was once listed as Britain’s most most popular lead, which shows you.
Oh yes, racism. Considering the period, it’s not as awful as it might have been. Jack does black up to pass as Egyptian. Since most of the film’s other Egyptians are also played by white dudes, this isn’t as unconvincing as it’s probably meant to be. The film is about drug smuggling — does this mean it would have been banned in the US? Or maybe it wouldn’t have stood a chance of release there anywhere outside the UK — none of our awful comedians cracked America, though HEY! HEY! USA! (1938) paired Will Hay with Edgar Kennedy in a foredoomed attempt at breaking through to a new and bigger audience. But America always had bigger idiots of their own.
(Wikipedia notes that TCAC never got a US release, also that Anna Lee met and married Robert Stevenson, who’s billed as Associate Producer, on the picture.)
There are a couple of songs, I have to warn you. There’s an Arab caravan chorus about robbing and killing which is quite cheerful, and then Jack has a gratuitous solo number which is good fun. Speaking of which, here’s a fun drug trip musical number with Melesian trick effects from another Hulbert flick.
By coincidence, this song is memorably used in MURPHY’S WAR, for which I’ve recently made a video essay (for the Arrow Films Blu-ray release).
THE CAMELS ARE COMING is mostly harmless, if witless. It took four chumps to write this rubbish, plus Hulbert himself on dialogue. Had the story been stronger, the comic situations been more and funnier, he could have been inspired to greater heights. Still, I can’t say I wouldn’t watch another Hulbert film. BULLDOG JACK has Ralph Richardson in it, and KATE PLUS TEN is a comic thriller based on an Edgar Wallace “shocker.” I find Wallace unreadably dully, despite the fact that one third of novels sold in English used to be written by him, or some such fantastical statistic. Spoofing him seems like the correct approach, though even there he may be too tedious.
NB: Doesn’t actually look much good, apart from an imported Genevieve Tobin.
The big finish of TCAC, in a besieged fort with Jack shooting Arabs off their camels, is a bit uncomfortable. I don’t recall any films where even Germans in wartime get this kind of treatment — killed as slapstick. It makes you appreciate how careful Keaton was with the very black comedy in THE GENERAL’s battle scene. Other examples of this kind of thing: Tashlin’s SON OF PALEFACE, where the slaughter of Indians for laughs is now very uncomfortable, even though it could be defended as genre parody — alas it’s not really ATTACKING the genre assumptions — and from the same director, the weirdly dislikeable (and I love Tashlin when he’s good) MARRY ME AGAIN, which celebrates Bob “the Butcher of Strasbourg” Cummings’ wartime heroics by having him shoot down countless “Jap” fighter planes, for laffs.
A strange personal resonance — when I were a lad, at the local Odeon in the seventies there was an ad for Rank Cinemas, a montage of unknown film clips, culminating in a closeup of a masticating or ruminating camel, with the words COME – BACK – SOON appearing sequentially over its face. The shot, as I recall, was in black and white, showing how far behind the times Rank had fallen. This movie MAY be the source of the camel shot.
Verdict: Jack Hulbert is Not Entirely Awful, but his films kind of are.
shadowplay 