Slush

A bolder film industry would have a natural role for this man in a remake of Victor Hugo’s THE MAN WHO LAUGHS.

When we think of Ealing comedies, we don’t immediately think of George Formby’s kid-friendly slapstick, but Ealing made more films with him than it did with Mackendrick or Hamer or Crighton.

Is Formby awful? I think his films mostly are bad, though sort of cosy. His songs are good, though. They slightly contradict his screen persona, your basic Lancastrian gowk. As Matthew Sweet remarks in Shepperton Babylon, Formby portrays a strumming, vacant child, but he has a salacious side too. I think the two aspects or facets can be squared alright — little boys have an eager interest in anything a bit dirty, they snigger in triumph whenever the veil slips protecting them from sights, sounds or knowledge the adult world wants to keep from them. It is this puerile triumph George displays when smut is afoot. But any hint of real lust sends him scurrying away with a cry of “Mother!”

We watched TROUBLE BREWING with the impossible pairing of George and Googie Withers (though George does LOOK like a man whose girl might be called “Googie Withers”). It has little to do with brewing. George is a newspaperman on the trail of forged banknotes or “slush” — the money is printed at a fake distillery, so the booze element is smuggled in. Everyone ends up toppling into vats of yeast. It’s the most yeasty farce since Keaton’s MY WIFE’S RELATIONS. (George held Googie below the surface on the gunk tank so he could snog her out of sight of the wife, who fiercely policed his love scenes, convinced that George was an irresistible babe magnet.

George has a sort of partner in this, another music hall type, Gus McNaughton, MUCH less appealing (one of the smutty commercial travelers in Hitchcock’s 39 STEPS). Not notably smarter than George, he’s more aggressive and serves to get our man into trouble, but it would always be more amusing to watch him get into it on his own “initiative”. Still, if George isn’t awful enough to suit everybody (he has his amusing songs and can slide down banisters with panache), Gus ought to make up for it.

Many of these kind of comedies seem to end in warehouse chases, reminding me of Olivier Assayas’ doleful critique of American cinema — “Many American films have interesting ideas, but they always seem to end with a fight in a warehouse.” This one achieves a striking moment when George, rolling in a barrel, topples from a high window then bounces into a lower one, a moment achieved with some smooth stop motion. Is there any more of this in the Formby oeuvre? I like the idea of him becoming a sort of Charley Bowers in a cartoon universe, but it may be too late to pull it off now.

Farcical misunderstandings at one point propel George into the ring for a bout of all-in wrestling, and the uncredited behemoth he’s faced with is pretty funny. He gets more laughs in his short bit that George does in the movie.

Still, there are songs.

Our director is Anthony Kimmins, who would go on to make the ambitious and interesting MINE OWN EXECUTIONER, before ruining his promise and Dennis Price’s career with the terrible BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE. He has no particular flair for gag construction or framing, I have to say, but none of the directors of this sort of thing in Britain seemed to have, even the ones who specialised in it or showed talent in other fields (eg Basil Dearden, who made three Will Hay movies, a Tommy Trinder, a Benny Hill star vehicle (!) and script contributions to a Formby.

Speaking of Dearden — we watched LET GEORGE DO IT!, a wartime espionage comedy in which George plays a member of the Dinky Dos musical troupe who gets waylaid and mistaken for an intelligence agent. “There must be some mistake, I’m not intelligent, I’m a Dinky Do.” He never stops trying to explain himself by citing his Dinky Do status, which of course means nothingto anyone, especially in Norway where our action is mostly laid (though there’s not much local colour).

An image from our collective nightmares.

It’s pretty moronic stuff, but fun — it’s strange to imagine that if Hitchcock hadn’t gone to America he might have ended up making this. George slightly overrelies on catch phrases — “Turned out nice again” — spoken, nonsensically, when someone shines a light in his face — and “Never touched me!” triumphantly yelled whenever he’s getting the worst of it in a fight. We also laughed at “You can’t marry both of us, that’d be arson!” It’s all on a very high level, as John L. Sullivan would say. The song Mr Wu’s a Window Cleaner Now is likewise a rehash, two early Formby hits being “Mr Wu” and “When I’m Cleaning WIndows.”

There’s a striking bit where baddies dose George with “Scopalamine” — a truth drug credited with ensuring good performances at the Moscow Show Trials (it’s only 1940 and we’re not quite ready to forgive Stalin for that non-aggression treaty…) The usually complaisant George, doped to the eyeballs, cheerfully trash-talks his captors to their faces. Then there’s a surrealistic hallucination scene which culminates in George walloping Hitler.

Also a somewhat horrific slapstick number in a bakery. George reminds me of Wallace from Wallace and Gromit, and I think there may be an actual influence at work. Animator Nick Park has outed himself as a Norman Wisdom fan, so it’d be strange if he hadn’t consumed some Formby in his time.

One of George’s foils is Bernard Lee, M from the early Bond films. He also turns up in SPARE A COPPER, directed by Norman Wisdom specialist John Paddy Carstairs. It’s a small, incestuous world, that of the Awful British Comedian, and I’m not just speaking of Old Mother Riley’s domestic arrangements.

Director of LET GEORGE is Marcel Varnel, hardworking Frenchman who made NINE Formby picks, four Crazy Gangs and eight Will Hays, plus two Arthur Askeys. Ahhh, Arthur Askey. He, too, must be reckoned with…

VERDICT: George started to grow on us. The films are not exactly ambitious or interesting. But they wear down resistance.

Awful British Comedians

So, along the way, during my progress in life, I seem to have acquired a box set of Will Hay films, a bigger box set of Norman Wisdom films, Arthur Askey’s THE GHOST TRAIN, and an extensive collection of George Formby bootlegs. One disc seems to have six hours of George on it, a heartbreaking thought.

I’m not going to watch all those, am I? Masochism has limits. But maybe I can blog about the odd sample. Of course it would be wrong to exclude Arthur Lucan (Old Mother Riley) and I’ve never seen a Charlie Drake movie, although I have seen him do some “straight” acting. Who else? I like some of the Carry On films and don’t consider those actors awful, but the later entries in the series are plenty gruesome, and the “sexy” knock-offs — Confessions of… etc are incredibly terrible. If a requirement of an awful British comedian is a ghastly face, maybe Robin Askwith counts. But I don’t really dislike him as a performer. It’s the things he tended to perform in that give me the dry heaves. I don’t know that I’m going to watch any of those — I take the conspiratorial view that the saucy British sex comedy was part of a government programme, Operation Prole-Wipe, aimed at reducing reproduction among the working classes. One glance at Askwith’s encrimsoned features in the act of love is enough to ensure a month’s uninterrupted sterility — it’s an unshakeable article of faith with me.

Is Tommy Steele a comedian, as such? He’s definitely awful. And he fits in with most of these others, in that I have a sneaking affection for him. Part of being British is having a sneaking affection for really indefensible tripe, including actual literal tripe. Formby and Wisdom and Steele were on TV a lot when I was a kid, and I enjoyed their singing, mugging and falling over. On the other hand, Frankie Howerd was a comedian of minor genius, but his films are generally awful. I’m in two minds with Frankie.

Maybe we should work out some ground rules. A true awful British comedian should, in Matthew Sweet’s memorable phrase, “like a human being reflected in a tap.” Yes, he was speaking of George. The best A.B.C.’s tend to be northerners, but that’s more of a guideline. Most of the fellows I’m thinking of are from the 1930s, 40s and 50s, but I think the trend continues, in attenuated form, at least as late as Cannon & Ball in Val Guest’s BOYS IN BLUE (1983) and Roy “Chubby” Brown in U.F.O. Most of them are aimed at working class audiences, often working class children, and many of them are working class themselves, but not all (stand up, Jack Hulbert).

Too bad Wilson & Keppel never made a major motion picture of their own.

Along the way, I’ll be checking out comics I’m barely familiar with, like the Crazy Gang. I might find some who aren’t so awful after all. I’ll write about them anyway. This will lead me into consideration of neglected filmmakers like Val Guest and Marcel Varnel. And I’ll take suggestions, starting now! Also interested in impassioned defences of your favourite A.B.C.s. I realise some of them do have fans.