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.

An Unamerican Untragedy

Is Chaplin spoofing Dreiser when Verdoux takes Annabella Bonheur out for a lonely row? It seems more likely that the reference is to the Paramount film version of AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1931) than to the source novel — a film directed by Chaplin’s old protege Josef Von Sternberg. The only remaining artifact, then, of their brief collaboration (until A WOMAN OF THE SEA turns up).

Annabella’s innocence is clearly stated at the scene’s outset, after the huge establishing shot which establishes not just the scenery but the tininess and isolation of the boat.

“Not a soul anywhere!”

“Perfect,” agrees Verdoux, with his most sinister smile. Dramatic irony/poignancy! Although I’ve swapped the shots around in the above two-panel set, to make it appear that they’re looking at each other. Blogs are no respecters of the 180 rule.

Chaplin, I think, understood that any strong dramatic situation can also be a strong comedic situation, with just a slight tweak.

More ironic exchanges, and Verdoux’s “anchor” is introduced: a rock with a rope around it and a noose on the loose end. Probably pretty effective if tied tightly, although the wearer would no doubt bob to the surface once the intestinal gases had done their work, and they would look very much as if they’d been murdered.

How you’d ever get the rope around Annabella’s big yapping head is a question that need not detain us at this point. Chaplin now goes out of his way to make Annabella once again a character in need of murdering, scolding Verdoux for his failure to promptly hand her a fishing rod. “Oh, don’t be a fool – by the time you bait the hook the fish’ll be gone.” Snippy AND irrational, two negative feminine stereotypes in one persona. Martha Raye’s lightning changes between sweet and vicious certainly keep things interesting.

Hooking Verdoux’s hat is a nice gag, timed so well that it survives uncertain framing (boats DRIFT, even when anchored — I suppose bodies do, too). Verdoux, meaning “sweet worm,” is I suppose interchangeable with the bait, which may be why he snags his trousers on the fishhook too. And that leads me to speculate that his “sweet worm” persona is the bait by which he catches his prey. The guppy-mouthed Martha Raye as Annabella is connected to a fish here, when she mistakes her reflection in the lake for a big one — the one that got away, I guess.

Chaplin’s lightning transition from malign, noose-wielding maniac to simpering idiot when Annabella turns is almost cartoon-fast. Somehow it works, despite there being no real way for him to change pose during the turn of a head, and without undercranking too. The simper was memorably seen in another lightning-change sequence back in 1917, in THE CURE:

Chaplin likes the gag, so he repeats it. In my recent conversation with Ian Lavender, he pointed out Chaplin’s tendency to milk a gag, contrasting this with Buster Keaton’s once-and-we’re-done technique. The Keaton approach is more difficult and challenging, requiring more material — and you could argue that Buster wore out his imagination with it (though other factors were at play). But Chaplin’s repetitions WORK, as you can hear for yourself whenever you see the film with an audience. The childish delight in repetition is a powerful force. Something silly happening repeatedly has a chance of getting even funnier with each cycle.

“Are you sea-sick?”

“No.”

“Shame on you, a man who’s live at sea all his life. Oh, captain, really!”

Raye seems to struggle with making the above exchange sound natural, and one can hardly blame her. Billy Wilder complained that Chaplin’s dialogue was infantile, and he’s not entirely wrong — at times, it’s rather clumsy, and it never reaches the elegance of a Sturges or a Mankiewiecz or Wilder & Brackett. You could sometimes accuse him of the same ineptitude as George Lucas. “My dialogue isn’t the best but it gets you from A to B,” claims Lucas, which makes me reach for a Sturges line: “By way of Cincinatti with a side-trip through Detroit.” These guys who aren’t strong with dialogue aren’t elegant enough to be simple, they pad it out with irrelevancies and an oppressive weight of unneeded verbiage.

It also feels like a Winsor McCay speech bubble, with words crammed in willy-nilly to fill space. Oh!

But then Verdoux attempts to use, presumably, chloroform, and Annabella’s sudden movement (she somehow thinks she’s caught a fish with her naked hook) causes him to topple backwards and drop the soporific hanky over his own face. This is the film’s best visual gag sequence, is what I’m saying — almost the only one to serve up regular, effective gags of this kind, and I think it’s made possible by the Dreiser set-up. Good situations make for good gags. A strong dramatic problem forces your character to try outrageous solutions, and then more outrageous things can go wrong…

Chaplin looming — as best a 5’5″ man can loom — over Raye, recalls George O’Brien in SUNRISE — another possible influence. (Carl Mayer’s script surely drew inspiration from Dreiser’s 1925 novel, which might be why the murder scheme in the Murnau film makes no sense, has no real motivation — it’s a stray piece of plot imported from elsewhere).

Verdoux now talks Anabella through the art of lassoing fish — and again, she is the fish, but now the worm has turned. But he’s interrupted by an appalling sound: yodeling. This is the part that cracks Fiona up. Yodeling saving a life, rather than merely immiserating it, is pretty funny. And this particularly goofy overdubbed yodeling: it sounds like it’s being done right into the mic. Maybe a case of Tatiesque elimination of aural perspective for comic effect? Maybe not consciously chosen as such though.

Then, after he’s already given up his homicidal plans, Verdoux is topped into the drink by Annabella. Excellent cartoon reactions from Raye: she goes from one “extreme” to another, holding each pose for mere frames:

Annabella eventually saves her beau, but only after yelling for help to the oblivious yodellers, and then she berates him for standing up in a boat, which she was doing also. Infuriating. But not enough to allow Chaplin to contemplate offing her. She’s kind of the sand in the criminal vaseline.

A murder is announced

Last couple of days I’ve felt a bit better, so even though the GP didn’t think what I’d got would respond to antibiotics, maybe he was wrong. Or else maybe it’s just getting better on its own.

One good thing: since New Year when I first got sick, I’ve written most of my next book. I won’t publish it right away, probably, don’t want to “flood the market”, heh. Meantime, if anyone can suggest ways to publicise the current one, or can review it on Amazon, or can bit it up on social media, that’s something I’d greatly appreciate. And if you know any famous authors who might be tempted to provide a blurb for Vol.3, that would also be amazing. I’m very pleased at having had Anne Billson and David Quantick and Mark Millar and Sean French (film writer and one half of Nicci French) contribute blurbage for the first two vols.

I’ve had a few Canadian sales so here’s a link to encourage further Canuck customers.

Back to MONSIEUR VERDOUX, as promised. After his opening preamble, Chaplin introduces the Couvais family, with an unusually complex camera movement. From a caged songbird he tilts and pans, a little raggedly, down to a snoring Couvais male, and from him to a smarter, more studious, altogether more CONSCIOUS Couvais, who shushes him; he moves his chair to evade the distracting noise, and camera tracks back to keep him view, which gives us a better view of a couple of the Couvais ladies. One of these is the great Almira Sessions from the Preston Sturges stock company. Sturges employed Conklin, Chaplin borrows Sessions, but he would let Sturges use a clip from one of his silents in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. The doorbell jingles and this causes the camera to pan, in a slightly mysterious but natural-looking way, onto a third Couvais female, who is knitting. She is also Jimmy Dean’s grandmother in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE.

Bickering ensues. The Couvais family is no happier than the later groupings in Nick Ray’s masterwork. Because they are noisy and spiteful and querulous, we are being set up to not pity them when tragedy strikes. It’s a frequent device in black comedy, but I like it better in KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS, where most of the victims are amiable and blameless, and sympathy (of any meaningful kind) is withheld merely by comic distance, irony.

There is some slapstick here with a tray getting banged by someone’s head and then tipped so soup pours into the snoring man’s mouth, but it’s not really funny. The people are too obnoxious — there’s nobody to be concerned for, which seems to me a usually-necessary element of slapstick. But it sets up that this is a comedy and some fairly broad business is going to get put across.

One of the women — Eula Morgan, I think — is giving a performance even louder than the others, with a lot of silent-movie Italianate hand gestures, almost getting us into the perfidious realm of the Keystone Explicatory Pantomime. She makes me long for the scene to end.

The gist of it is that the absent sister Thelma — not the most French name, French people can’t even SAY Thelma — has run off with a man, drawing out all her savings. A photograph of this potential Bluebeard is produced. Everyone crowds into a theatrical grouping to admire it:

And then, having introduced Chaplin in photographic effigy, we dissolve to an establishing shot and another intertitle — which I;m inclined to save for Sunday.

Overall impression of this scene is that Chaplin isn’t half the dialogue director Capra or Sturges or Hawks were at this time. And he’s a little overeager to get laughs out of a straight exposition scene, which might have been better played as a slightly flat melodrama. As Sydney Pollack put it — and these are words to live by — “Let the boring crap be boring crap.”