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.

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.