My researches into Awful British Comedians led me to the rather special BACK-ROOM BOY with Arthur Askey and thus to Herbert Mason, its director, who showed real chops. I needed to see more of this guy’s work.
Mason worked in the ABC subgenre more than once, but the first film we watched was A WINDOW IN LONDON (1940), aka LADY IN DISTRESS, a moody quasi-thriller which turns out to be — unsurprisingly, once the plot has finished playing out — a remake of a French noiresque thing called METROPOLITAIN (1939), which was directed by one Maurice Cam — very stylishly — and starred Albert Prejean and Ginette Leclerc. French poetic realist fatalism with a working-class couple who don’t get to spend any time together because he works days and she works nights. both get into trouble in a rather dramatically overcrowded day and night (and morning).
Mason’s version of this sack of grim ironies stars Michael Redgrave and Phyllis Calvert as Couple Number One, with the work-life-balance problems, Paul Lukas and Sally Gray as Couple Number Two, an egomaniac magician and his glamorous assistant, whose problems may be altogether more deadly, and which start to suck in Redgrave when they meet up. Odd to see Redgrave as just a regular working bloke, but he does it well. Maybe this guy will get bit by the showbiz bug and take up ventriloquism?
Cam’s film is stylish and risque. Mason’s, in its own way, is just as good. If I hadn’t seen and been impressed by another of his movies I’d have bet he borrowed his most striking effects from the French original, but this is not so.
There’s an amazing scene with no equivalent in the French version: Redgrave and Gray are talking, getting maybe romantically entangled, at his building site place of work after dark (where Westminster Bridge is under construction). The night watchman can only sort of hear them. Their dialogue keeps fading in and out, muffled and then amplified by atmospherics. As he listens with interest, the camera pushes in a touch, synchronised to the rise of the voices, then halts its advances as the voices fade… then they start up again and we push in again. Four little push-ins in total. Riveting — and very, very unusual. Somebody should steal it. But change it up, don’t just DePalma the thing.
The story suffers a bit from seeming to posit a thriller scenario — man sees murder from train window — a scenario that’s served for several subsequent thrillers — but then discards it — tracked down, the murderer produces his still-living victim and claims that the apparent assault was an abandoned attempt at a suicide pact. Moments later it transpires that the couple were merely rehearsing a stage act with a fake knife. So the jeopardy and emotional temperature gets dialled way down and we start to wonder if this is a thriller at all. I’m still not certain — but it’s for sure a melodrama, and a very interesting one. Amour fou times two.
Stage magician Jasper Maskelyn is credited as technical advisor for the stage magic — I know his name because of his war work, using illusionism to deceive the enemy — turns out you can cheaply fake up a bunch of tanks, convincing to aerial reconnaissance, with flat bits of balsa cut to the appropriate plan.
I was able to see METROPOLITAIN in a lovely glossy form, but AWIL is AWOL — the only copy I could get is a very fuzzy off-air recording. An analogue of the French and British approach to cinema, or to the relative popular appeal of Prejean and Redgrave? NO! It turns out you can see the film legitimately on the BFI Player for just £2.50 if you’re in the UK (or have a suitable VPN, I guess). It’s well worth it.
STOP PRESS: It’s on YouTube!
A WINDOW IN LONDON stars Maxwell Frere; The Nurses: Nurse Freddi Linley; Prof. Pierre Aronnax; Lloyd Hastings; Angela Labardi; Sally – Jellyband’s Daughter; Phil Corkery; Ned Horton; General Faversham; and Mr. Snedrig.
My exploration of the works of Herbert Mason continues. Lots of his films are unavailable so far as can see. BACK-ROOM BOY was a rare example of real cinematic flair being applied to the British slapstick film, and A WINDOW ON LONDON was a slick and graceful combination of slice-of-life realism and noir melodrama.
STRANGE BOARDERS is also very stylish in a Hitchcockian way. It’s the kind of spy romp he might have enjoyed, although making the hero a professional espionage investigator is something he’d probably have balked at.
Scene one: a little old lady is hit by a bus. Well, it gets your attention. When she’s discovered to have been carrying top secret blueprints of Britain’s newest MacGuffin, and investigation of her lodging house is clearly indicated, so ace spy Tommy Blythe (Tom Walls) is dragged from his honeymoon to go undercover. His wife, who doesn’t know about his covert work, is naturally outraged and suspicious, so she follows him — into the lions’ den!
I became fascinated by the plot’s close resemblance to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film L’ASSASSIN HABITE…AU 21. In both stories, an investigator goes undercover in a boarding house to find out which of the tenants is involved in an ongoing crime, and is joined by his wife, who shows up unexpectedly and without his agreement, determined to investigate on her own. In both stories there’s a blind man among the lodgers, and the denouement is strikingly similar in ways it wouldn’t do to go into without spoilering both films and their respective source novels.
For here’s the thing — STRANGE BOARDERS is based on a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Strange Boarders of Palace Crescent, while Clouzot’s film is based on L’assassin habite au 21 by Franco-Belgian crime writer S.A. Steeman. I call shenanigans!
Mason’s film scripted by the great Sidney Gilliat and A.R. Rawlinson, who worked on the first MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and was a genuine military intelligence officer in both the Great War and the one that was about to break out. They rejigged the plot quite a bit — in the very prolific Oppenheim’s book the hero is single, and is not an intelligence man, he’s more like the Hitchcockian amateur/innocent.
Steeman’s French novel appeared shortly after the British film, so he could certainly have seen it, if it were showing in France or if he saw it in England and could speak English. He couldn’t have been stealing from the book because the key elements common to both works are not in the Oppenheim original.
I can’t convict Steeman, who was a prolific and quite imaginative author (Clouzot’s magnificent QUAIS DES ORFEVRES is also based on a Steeman work, though apparently quite loosely as Clouzot couldn’t remember the exact plot and couldn’t find a copy of the paperback), but I thought I’d read synopses of his other works, since plagiarism is rarely a one-time crime unless the author is immediately caught. And indeed, Steeman’s Le Furet/The Ferret, filmed in 1949, does sound quite a bit like the film of Georges Simenon’s Picpus. Both involve anonymous letter-writers and a fortune teller, if memory serves. But stealing from Simenon, or from a recent adaptation of Simenon, would be far riskier than swiping from an obscure British thriller film. It looks like Steeman borrowed some plot elements but reworked them into his own pattern. He may have felt that’s what he was doing, legitimately, with L’Assassin…
Clouzot’s film doesn’t do much with its blinded prize-fighter, who is just a red herring, whereas STRANGE BOARDERS gets terrific mileage out of its sightless villain — in one scene, Tommy Blythe, standing stock-still to escape detection, is nearly given away by the soft ticking of his wristwatch, until he pokes his arm out the open window and it’s drowned out by traffic atmos. There’s also a fight in a darkroom — exciting stuff.
Kinky, too — Tommy playfully threatens his wife with a spanking, and when he captures one enemy agent, the ubiquitous Googie Withers, he has to enlist his wife’s aid to get her bound and gagged in the back of a car. Much is made of Renée Saint-Cyr stripping off Googie’s stoking to bind her ankles… Something Clouzot would have enjoyed, if he’d seen it, and would probably have insisted on swiping, but his film doesn’t have any equivalent of the Googie character.
Actually, the means by which Tommy gets this femme fatale out of a public night club, by insisting she’s his wife, also turns up in Edward Dmytryk’s Columbia B-movie THE BLONDE FROM SINGAPORE, made just a few years after STRANGE BOARDERS, but there may well be other movies that use that trope, which relies on the sinister assumption that the public will always believe a man over a woman.
I have been unaware of Tom Walls except for a vague idea about the Aldwych farces he produced on stage and directed on film. Now I’m starting to see them and he’s a fantastic comic actor, but perhaps a little long in the tooth for his role as a dashing bridegroom here. He’s an amazing and versatile character actor who wants to be a leading man.
Also featured: a nubile Irene Handl and Martita Hunt.
STRANGE BOARDERS stars Major Bone; Princess Isabelle; Helen Nosseros; Eldridge Harper; Lord Edgware; Mrs. Hudson; Tom Gradgrind; Sexton Blake; Alaric Chichester; Jellyband; Undetermined Role; Miss Havisham; and Joe Gargery.
“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.
shadowplay 