THE GIRL ON THE BOAT is Norman Wisdom doing PG Wodehouse… an alarming thought. The only feature of TV director Henry Kaplan, it’s never awful but never actually funny, either. Wodehouse so rarely works on the screen, but always works, gloriously, on the page. Why is this? True, a movie adaptation perforce loses the immortal comic prose, but you still have the delirious plotting, delightful characterisation and delectable dialogue. “Plum” successfully wrote plays. But there are almost no effective movie or TV versions. This one has good people like Richard Briers, Sheila Hancock, Bernard Cribbins, Reginald Beckwith and Peter Bull. The costumes and art direction are really nice. Wisdom does his best to blend in, and isn’t bad. But nothing catches fire. It just lies there like Laurence Harvey.
OLD MOTHER RILEY’S GHOSTS is one of the original run of OMR films. It was perhaps unfair to judge Arthur Lucan by his last “romp” — the CARRY ON and ST TRINIAN’S series had dismal final entries too. So now I’ve viewed a dismal early entry. I warmed to it slightly — it’s SO sloppily executed it has a kind of majesty. A lightning bolt goes off and makes no sound. Lucan has a weird random way of alternating explosive violence with wholly inappropriate underplaying. Responding to spooky trees a la SNOW WHITE, he just sits there, an unsuitable context in which to attempt the Kuleshov effect. Was the “impressive” castle set built for some other forgotten no-brow epic? It does look like John Gilling’s efforts, in VAMPIRE, to make this front cloth act “cinematic” was misguided — filmed as flatly as possible, the off-the-end-of-the-pier patter routines feel at home in their own squalor. The wretched filmmaking is actually funny.
Not certain whether HEY! HEY! USA! was Will Hay’s attempt to crack America or if someone just thought making this English archetype butt up against Chicago gangsters would be fun. It mostly is — Hay is teamed with Edgar Kennedy (!) and there’s a brat-kidnapping scheme which fails to get into Ransom of Red Chief terrain but involves one of the Bupp kids (Sonny Bupp is the one who plays young Charles Foster Kane — this is a different one). Charley Hall, another Laurel & Hardy foil, turns up briefly, and despite his years in America talks as if he’s never HEARD an American accent. A heavy race element rather spoils this one — Hay cluelessly uses the “n” word, and most of the cast gets accidentally blacked up inside a factory chimney before “blending in” with an emancipation march. The closest this gets to satire is Hay shouting advice to the cops who come to nab the mobsters: “Don’t hit him, he’s really coloured!”
ASK A POLICEMAN is one of Hay’s “classics” — it’s pretty good, another GHOST TRAIN knock-off, but interesting in the way they show the trio of rural cops (dream team Hay, Marriott and Moffat) as not only incompetent but crooked. Crooked cops in a British movie of the era would be pretty unusual, I think, and the censor even had, I think, rules against this. But, I suppose, as with Wodehouse’ descriptions of a servant who’s smarter than his boss, what seems like satire probably isn’t — the message in both cases is “How absurd!” The premise of a small town with no crime eerily anticipates HOT FUZZ, and the sinister local businessman of that film MIGHT stem from the semi-remake, original co-writer Val Lewton’s THE BOYS IN BLUE. Hard to be sure with Edgar Wright, who has seen lots of obscure stuff but seems to have gaps in his knowledge (as do we all).
MISS LONDON LIMITED was Val Guest’s first film as director, an Arthur Askey musical with some ambitious crane shots during the songs, but a rather open-plan blocking style — no reverse angles, everything one way, a slight sense of a proscenium just out of view. Richard Hearne (Mr. Pastry) jitterbugging is pretty great. Guest shows his hand by having his leads impersonate the Marx Bros, his clear inspiration in so much of his patter comedy. But Askey and co, very talented in their own way, are no Marxes.
GASBAGS — the Crazy Gang in wartime. As the author of a novel with a WWII German drilling machine, and a (forthcoming) novel with multiple Hitlers, I had to like this a bit as it has both. There’s some good surreal plotting, also some cringey laughing-at-concentration-camps stuff, and the Gang still don’t make sense to me as a comedy team. Too many of them, they’re all alike (all crazy — you could swap their dialogue around and it wouldn’t matter). Moore Marriott appears in this one as his usual toothless duffer character. They do kill the odd Nazi, though, which is gratifying. Will Hay’s THE GOOSE STEPS OUT was a little too merciful. Extra points for scene where an irate “fish and chip saloon” customer demands to know what species of fish this is he’s eating, and Bud Flanagan retorts “How do I know? Who do you think I am, Sir Bernard Spilsbury?” A joke apparently intended just for me, because I know that SBS was a senior forensics expert of the day.
“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.
“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.
shadowplay 