Bits

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.

Chump

Sample titles of IMDb reviews of Charlie Drake films:

“Another TV comic bites the dust”

“Too much of a mediocre thing”

“Stupid movie with strangely short actor.”

“Now we know what’s inside a Dalek!”

“If a joke doesn’t work keep on trying”

and, my favourite:

“NO”

I’m looking at THE CRACKSMAN (1963). Drake was big on ITV, had hit comedy records, and so somebody had to try him in the movies. Several somebodies, in fact. John Paddy Carstairs, Norman Wisdom’s first and I guess best director, had the first shot. David MacDonald, whose straight dramas (THE BROTHERS) tend to crack me up, paired him with sex goddess Anne Heywood. Peter Graham Scott tried twice. Finally Gerry O’Hara made a miniaturisation comedy for the Children’s Film Foundation. He never took off.

None of these films is easy to see in decent quality, which is kind of a shame because Harry Waxman who shot BRIGHTON ROCK and SAPPHIRE did THE CRACKSMAN. It looks horrible in a grainy TV pan-and-scan. Ron Goodwin does the music, a typical jaunty march. Lots of touristic London landmarks, always a bad sign.

Still, Dennis Price and George Sanders offer suave support. Drake has a tendency to affect a comically inept posh accent, so the class angle is nicely pointed up by having these guys exploiting our pint-sized hero. (The distaste for Awful British Comedians could be a bit classist, couldn’t it? Before Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python, professional comedians in Britain tended to be working class, and they came from either the music hall or working men’s pubs. And then there was a sea change and most of the old guys came to be regarded as Awful…)

Drake is very small and very ginger. He was from the Elephant and Castle, which makes the idea of pairing him with Michael Caine seem like a natural, but alas that never happened. They have the same haircut.

Heresy time — I like Drake better than Norman Wisdom. I think he’s talented, and he’s not as desperate to milk pathos out of every reversal. The movie tries for a bit of the Chaplinesque, but Drake isn’t too eager to get on board. The lack of flop sweat effort makes him much more relaxing to watch.

Yeah, the film is still dreadful though.

Peter Graham Scott can’t do slapstick to save his life. He did direct Children of the Stones on TV though, so I’ll cut him some slack. Also CAPTAIN CLEGG. But also THE HEADLESS GHOST which is unbelievable tripe. (We like tripe in Britain, we eat it up.) There’s an awful gag where Drake falls into a low-budget offscreen pond and emerges blacked-up with mud and sporting seaweed dreadlocks. Seaweed? Doesn’t even make sense. There are a few smiles to be had from his gadget-strewn home/locksmith’s shop. I like gadgets. I eat ’em up.

Visual gags are difficult. They require invention, cinematic skill, and they have to suit the story, the style and especially the performer. British cinema had all these crap comics requiring visual material when they made the leap to films, but nobody seemed to be able to do it, or if they did they couldn’t get a job. One reason I idolise Richard Lester is he was the honourable exception.

There are other interesting people in this — comedy legend Ronnie Barker, executing a lightning sketch of what would become his masterpiece, Norman Stanley Fletcher from sitcom Porridge — Finlay Currie, Carol Cleveland. And occasional moments of cinema — if the film had more genre parody, Scott might be on a surer footing. A tracking shot past rows of convicts exchanging rumours is nicely choreographed, an unexpected whiff of actual cinema.

In fairness to the director, the compositions here have been so insensitively hacked about it’s impossible to know if it were ever attractively framed. The pan-and-scan appears to have been in the hands of some Norman Wisdom character. Here’s a two-shot:

Such butchery, along with the pinked colour and fuzzy transfer, adds to the film’s dystopian quality, which is intense. Drake is a little ray of sunshine, comparatively. It feels like he could have made it in movies if only he’d had the support. The resources are here — Technicolor and Cinemascope and co-stars (admittedly Sanders and Price would appear in literally any old rubbish, but they do lend class) — but not the script or gags. A resourceful comic can do a lot with a little, but you need SITUATIONS.

There’s a mass fight in a sort of private museum at the end. Lots of spot gags involving unlikely props (boomerang, guillotine, stuffed snake) but they’re all murdered by the execution. While they might be slightly better if you could see the whole image, you can tell by the editing that nothing much is working.

Drake’s debut feature, SANDS OF THE DESERT, tries to clone the shoddy Wisdom format without a budget. The “production values” astonish by their absence. It call it “threadbare” would flatter it with the implication that including threads had been considered. This is a feature of some ABC films but not all: Formby movies moved from the poverty row clapboard emptiness of his Mancunian Films productions, to relatively lavish stuff at Ealing, with big sets and ambitious model effects. MOTHER RILEY MEETS THE VAMPIRE is cheap-looking, but tries. OLD MOTHER RILEY’S GHOSTS, despite some sizeable sets, has the air of a rough assembly edit shot by chimpanzees.

One can imagine, if one closes one’s eyes and strains, a creative filmmaker using the constraints of a pitifully inadequate budget to make an Arabian-set comedy in a stylised Melies fashion. This movie, of course, does not do that — like the misbegotten ARE YOU BEING SERVED? movie, or CARRY ON ABROAD, it tries to simulate exotic locations with tiny, cramped sets. True, Drake is a small man, but his co-stars are of average size, and they can barely stand erect without overshooting the cyclorama here. I got nostalgic about THE CAMELS ARE COMING faster than you’d think possible.

As with Formby or Hay pictures, the costlier stuff is done with model effects, only much cheaper ones. These almost acquire a naive tabletop charm, like a Smallfilms children’s animation, or Michael Bentine’s Potty Time. If the film had the courage to make its crapness part of the joke, it might kind of succeed. Norman Wisdom described his typical screen persona as “a successful failure” — that’s what these films should be aiming for, stressing their underdog status. SANDS can’t even afford the odd circus camel, like the lopsided dromedary I saw as a kid whose hump was sagging down its side like a Salvador Dali watch. Mainly everybody just rides donkeys. Again, this could be funny if the film wanted it to be and knew how to signal its intentions — think of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL’s coconut shells. This is more like the crummy backdrops of CARRY ON COLUMBUS — just THERE, occupying screen space, sort of whistling innocently to itself as if we might mistake it for something adequate. Which sums up the whole film.

Raymond Huntley, a genre staple in ABC pictures, is an irate boss. Marne Maitland, Tutte Lemkow and Roger Delgado are faux-swarthy types. Racism and cheapskate exoticism are taken as read. When Charlie accidentally upsets a pair of Japanese tourists on his flight, his clueless response — “There’s no need to get excited about it — you Latin races are all the same!” — kind of short-circuits the possible offensiveness. I think.

Like its hero, SANDS OF THE DESERT is so puny-looking I feel bad about attacking it. But I can only imagine how anybody would have felt after paying money to see this.

Drake is known today, if at all, for two things — a sketch show bit where he embodies an entire orchestra. Simple but effective VFX — editing, splitscreen, mirrors, and maybe a sort of multifaceted flyvision lens. Passable gags. Quite nice.

And also for a gag that went wrong — solid shelves were fitted instead of breakaway ones, and he got flung into them and knocked cold live on air. Desperate to finish the sketch with a star higher up the Glasgow coma scale than was traditional, his co-stars carry on throwing his lifeless little body about the set.

I was shown this as part of my health & safety training at the BBC and it suitably horrified me. Rumours persist that the carpenters fixed the shelves on purpose because Drake was so despised. (Not as comic: as bloke.)

THE CRACKSMAN stars Baron Hardon; Addison DeWitt; Hector Snipe; Dame Margot Fonteyn; General Willard; Magwitch; Sgt. Grogan; Sir Frederick Gray; Sergeant Cuff; Bilbo (voice); Calibos; Norman Stanley Fletcher; Col. Virginia Lake; Fiddler; Zoot/Dingo; and Ayak.

SANDS OF THE DESERT stars Smallweed; Colonel Sharki; Maid Marian Fitzwalter; Joseph Whemple; Dr. Guani – Foreign Minister, Uruguy; President Sandover Haleesh; The Malay; The Master; Fiddler; and Sister Briony.

Verdict: Charlie Chase had some talent; his films act like brick walls constructed to obscure it.