Wind

“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.

Launder & Boycott

I’d seen most of Launder & Gilliat’s films, but not CAPTAIN BOYCOTT. This one was directed by Launder (they kinda took turns producing and directing, both wrote) in 1947, which is just before they reckoned British cinema was crippled by the establishment of something called PIFL, pronounced “piffle” — it was meant to coordinated the work of the various actors contracted to the Rank Films Organisation, to make sure everyone was used to best advantage — in effect, though, it resulted in inappropriate actors being thrust into unsuitable roles.

None of that here — it’s a tale set in nineteenth century Ireland and most of the actors can at least do passable stabs at the accent. Not Alistair Sim, though, he just sounds Scottish. Stewart Granger does surprisingly well. And there are plenty of real Irish actors: Kathleen Ryan had been propelled to stardom by ODD MAN OUT, Niall MacGinnis was always great, Liam Redmond likewise, and it’s good to see Noell Purcell in a larger role. Where Irish character players could not be procured, Celts predominate, so Sim is joined by Mervyn Johns.

It’s the story of a vicious English landowner defeated by non-violent means — the locals shun him, refuse to harvest his fields or work in his house, and drive him out by sheer obstreperousness. Non-violence, it turns out, can be really vicious.

The big surprise is that Cecil Parker plays Boycott, an excellent actor who’s more suited to querulousness than outright villainy. Does he really have the gravitas to drive the drama? I suppose the point is that Boycott doesn’t need to be a formidable individual since society — in the form of the occupying Brits — takes his side at all times. The army even helps bring in his harvest. When the locals fight back, the individual human is the weak point that breaks.

Both Launder and Gilliat seemed to be capable of moments of gialloesque lurid expressionism, which we see particularly in GREEN FOR DANGER and ENDLESS NIGHT — but there’s none of that here. And they don’t have Lean’s sense of landscape. So it’s a perfectly decent film but without any particular standout elements, other than the interesting choice of subject and strong cast.

It’s intriguing, the Irish sympathies you get in British films of the period — ODD MAN OUT is ambivalent, and this same team’s I SEE A DARK STRANGER (excellent) is too light-hearted a film to make much of the Irish Question. This one can’t resist a few Irish jokes, but is on the side of the local populace against the foreign oppressor. It just doesn’t want to see violence used. I tend to agree. But we’re only just out of World War Two, and the British cinema didn’t have any problem with violence being used then…

CAPTAIN BOYCOTT stars Allan Quartermain; Beatriz Enriquez de Arana; Lord Loam; Ebenezer Scrooge; Bob Cratchit; Anton Mauve; Doctor Julian Karswell; General Willard; Mr. Brady – Nora’s Father; Richard Hannay; Maid Marian; Professor Henry Harrington; Dr. Watson; Dr. Watson; Jeremiah Mipps (coffinmaker); Samuel Pickwick; and Q.

Final Curtain for Mr. Curtiz

This is a hilarious directorial credit: an unresurrected Christ lying just below the moniker of a man moments from death himself. Well, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?

The idea of making a study of late Curtiz would normally only occur to somebody actually writing a book on the Hungarian-born filmmaker, because the view has long been that Curtiz had a strong sense of visual style but no particular set of obsessions to make a traditional auteur of him. So why look at his later, not-so good movies?

Curtiz made every kind of film, it seems. (Those who claim to have made every kind of film tend to be lacking in the horror, sci-fi and musical departments, but Curtiz made those too.) He brought a strong visual sensibility, but apparently cared nothing for themes and not much for actors or story. His boss, Jack Warner, wrote: “I had a general conversation with Mike Curtiz in the usual Curtiz manner in the dining room at noon, and all he talked about were the sets and that he wants to build a fort somewhere else, and all a lot of hooey. I didn’t hear him say a word about the story. In other words, he’s still the same old Curtiz—as he always will be!”

B. Kite is very good on this here. (Scroll down past my nonsense.)

B. also once opined to me that Curtiz maybe only works in black & white, though perhaps it’s truer and fairer to say that a certain quality of Curtiz comes through strongest that way. I think his two-strip terrors MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM and DOCTOR X. are terrific, so maybe Curtiz is still Curtiz with two strips of colour, but loses out with three. There are definitely good colour films made by Curtiz: THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, WE’RE NO ANGELS, etc. But they don’t quite have the distinct visual splendour of his WB monochrome movies. B. sees him, I think, as a very pure channel for the WB house style.

Still, the first thing to be said about Curtiz’s last three features is that they’re visually lovely, at least in places. All three are widescreen, and he seems able to adapt his tight compositions to the 1:2.35 frame ratio more comfortably than I would imagine 1:1.88 might suit him. A degree of difficulty helps him, and widescreen and academy ratio are both hard to compose for (snakes and funerals on the one hand, bungalows and bulldogs on the other).

   

THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1960) is frequently absolutely gorgeous, which matters a lot because it doesn’t quite find the right tone: you feel like some very good humour is being reported to you by somebody who doesn’t quite get it. Eddie Hodges (Huck) and Archie Moore (Jim) are decent, but don’t seem to gel with each other or anybody else. The rest of the cast go for big and broad: Tony Randall makes the most and then some of a series of phony accents, partnered up with Mickey Shaugnessy to create a team similar to the bad guys in Disney’s PINOCCHIO; Buster Keaton forms another of his unlikely double acts with Andy Devine, and doesn’t get to MOVE; Finlay Currie is fine as always. The best completely straight perf is Neville Brand, authentically scary and nasty as Pap Finn.

Now, as far back as THE EGYPTIAN in 1954, Peter Ustinov had formed the impression that Curtiz was not all there. He had always laboured under a considerable linguistic handicap (his mangling of the language was legendary, and wonderfully poetic at times — “Bring on the empty horses!” was evocative enough for David Niven to use it as title for one of his memoirs), and this combined with age and his disengagement from his actors maybe made him not the ideal man to do Twain. But he had succeeded at many other unlikely subjects in the past.

The Cinemascope stiffness, coupled with Curtiz’s own, the big, forced performances, and a lot of overplaying whenever Huck has to invent a “stretcher,” combine to stifle most of the comic possibilities here, so what we get instead is some moderate suspense and a pageant of grotesque characters and attractive settings. Ted D. McCord does a great job shooting it and Jerome Moross provides a typically ebullient score. It’s not poor, but it’s not quite alive.

Never mind, FRANCIS OF ASSISI (1961) is a religious epic, so you wouldn’t ever expect it to be alive, and it sure doesn’t disappoint. Saint-to-be Francis is played by a series of beautiful matte paintings of Bradford Dillman, Stuart Whitman is his frenemy/rival, and Dolores Hart the girl he throws over for God. She’s the only one in the film who breathes any humanity into her role, struggling against stiff dialogue and stilted situations. There’s a surprising lack of miracles and the animal-taming bit is given very  little play, surprisingly. Finlay Currie is fine as always, promoted from riverboat captain to pope, a big step up for an Edinburgh man.

   

Lots of spectacle, some of it impressive. The landscapes and the groupings of people fill the frame inventively, but Curtiz’s signature camera moves are becoming ever less frequent. He’ll push in occasionally; follow people about a little; but the grand sweep of his glory days when he’d hurry on to a set at an acute angle to the action, letting foreground furniture flash past, that’s all gone.

Bradford Dillman is someone I quite like, but he’s hopelessly adrift here. I’m not sure who could animate the script’s plaster saint. Occasional lines referring to Francis as “little” make you imagine someone intended him to be mild-mannered and tiny: by chance, Mervyn Johns is to hand, and I thought to myself, “Get me a young Mervyn Johns.” It can only work as a character part, as it’s so sexless. (Dillman could have slid some sly sensuality in there if there’d been the faintest opportunity: isn’t that what he’s for? Those lips!)

Piero Portalupi shot it and Mario Nascimbene provides the choral uplift.The film Curtiz bowed out on, however, was THE COMANCHEROS, released the same year (Curtiz died, aged 75, the following year). It’s pretty fair, I guess. If I liked John Wayne a bit more, or Stuart Whitman at all, I might call it an impressive finish for him. I think Whitman is miscast as a New Orleans gent on the run for killing a man in a duel. A lot of this movie is supposed to be enjoyable because of the spectacle of the plebeian Duke shoving his highfalutin prisoner around, but Whitman isn’t enough of a toff. You need Peter Lawford, probably. Wow, I never thought I’d type those words.

John Wayne had quite a track record of late films, didn’t he? After all there’s this, RIO LOBO, which was Howard Hawks’ last; BIG JAKE, George Sherman’s last; JET PILOT, a late Sternberg; BLOOD ALLEY, a late Wellman; TRUE GRIT, a late Hathaway; and THE CONQUEROR, which killed just about everyone in it. He also directed his own last film as director, BIG JAKE THE GREEN BERETS, and starred in his own last film as actor, THE SHOOTIST, a conscious self-elegy. I guess he just liked working with old guys when he was old, The most charming moment in THE COMANCHEROS is when Wayne signs into a hotel using the pseudonym “Ed McBain” and we notice that cinematographer William H. Clothier and the rest of the crew have checked in ahead of him. Curtiz hasn’t checked in, probably because he’s too busy checking out.

The best scene is a poker game where the single-source lighting is really beautiful and Wayne looks SO different and so much more interesting. Also playing is Lee Marvin, a bad guy with half a scalp (you could probably build a whole other Lee Marvin out of the bits Marvin had removed in his various characterisations). Elsewhere, the Arizona and Utah settings are epic and prehistoric. The finale is a bit pathetic: leading lady Ina Balin has to get over the death of her bad guy father in abound four seconds so she can look overjoyed at the happy ending. See also the studio-imposed finish of ONE-EYED JACKS.

Elmer Bernstein does the music on this one, and although it’s a bit more stately than THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, as befits Wayne’s age and lumbering gait, you get the idea. It seemed kind of weird to me how the music stays celebratory during life-and-death conflicts and chases. Shouldn’t we be taking this seriously?THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN: Starring Rockwell P. Hunter, Rhoda Penmark, Maj. Marvin Groper, Hunk Houghton, Daisy Hawkins, Link Appleyard, Rollo Treadway, Reinhardt Heidrich, Winnie the Pooh, Tom Fury, Johnny Farragut and Magwitch.

FRANCIS OF ASSISI: Starring Big Eddie, Lisa Held, Orvil Newton, Prof. Thurgood Elson, Dr. Stern, Mrs. Karswell, Bob Cratchit and Magwitch again.

THE COMANCHEROS: Starring Ethan Edwards, Orvil Newton again, Little Bonaparte, Liberty Valance, Lt. Greenhill, John Driscoll, Charlie Max and Garbitsch.