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.

Saving Farce

MONSIEUR VERDOUX continued —

Chaplin-as-Verdoux-as-Varney answers the door to the mailman and indulges in his first bit of farce comedy, pretending his wife is upstairs in her bedroom instead of outside dead in the incinerator. Much of the farce in VERDOUX revolves around money, rather than directly around murder, though the murder is not, as Verdoux seems to think, an insignificant side-issue.

The pseudonym “Varney” implies “vampire,” from the Victorian penny dreadful Chaplin may have remembered, though I don’t know how widely read it was by the time of his birth. It also implies Reg Varney, star of lowbrow seventies sitcom On the Buses, but that one’s definitely an anachronism.

Farce is all about the terror of being FOUND OUT, and Verdoux has a lot to keep secret. His methods of collecting his late wife’s savings are treated with Lubitschian lightness — there’s a delight in showing the whole of his journey up and down stairs, in a pedantic, pre-nouvelle vague way. Richard Lester has talked about the difficulty of doing farce on film, because as soon as you start to cut, the audience forgets which door they’re supposed to be watching. The solution may be to cut less often, which may also be why there are more good farces in pre-nouvelle vague cinema than after, and why rather visually primitive TV shows like Fawlty Towers and Father Ted could do farce with an adroitness denied the makers of LOOT, HOTEL PARADISO and ENTERTAINING MR SLOANE.

Chaplin’s counting of the money is a gag that looks like one of his silent-era undercranking tricks, but isn’t. CC has really trained himself to riffle through banknotes at superhuman speed. Verdoux is an ex-bank clerk, but even if he weren’t, this skilled efficiency is appropriate to a man who has coldbloodedly made homicide his business, and is going about it all very professionally. The difference between Chaplin and a real bank clerk is that he doesn’t have to actually keep count, he just has to look as if he is. So as long as his fingers are moving very fast and the banknotes seem to be getting got through by this process, he’s perfectly convincing as well as impressive.

The busy-ness of Verdoux’s business recalls Adenoid Heinkel, rushing from artist’s studio to office. Heinkel too played the piano, and there as here the reference seemed to be to Nero. Verdoux’s ability to entertain himself at the piano while putting through a call which will make use of the money he’s defrauded from his latest victim makes him more inhuman, not less. But it elevates the mood.

I really, really like the piano gag — a knock at the door confuses Verdoux, who thinks something has shaken loose inside the pianoforte. It’s an audio joke of the kind CITY LIGHTS is so full of, it’s the perfect sound film development of the visual gag (see also Tati) and I wish there was more of this kind of thing in the film.

The newcomer is a woman to clean up the house for resale, and she’s played by Christine Ell. Mysteriously, this is her only film. Chaplin must have liked her face, which is indeed wonderfully characterful.

After setting all this in motion, Chaplin cuts away to the police station, where the terrible Couvais family are reporting their relative’s disappearance, and we learn that the police are already becoming aware of Verdoux’s existence, even though they don’t know his identity…

This is useful exposition — the cops established here will play a role later — but more importantly it generates suspense, because all farces are, essentially, thrillers. They have the same sort of moving parts, but move them faster. And, as a tale of murder and theft, MONSIEUR VERDOUX’s farcical elements are far closer to the crime film than is usual.

This cutaway also allows Chaplin to ellipse-elapse some time, so that when we rejoin him he has the house up for sale. He immediately tries to seduce the prospective buyer, Mme. Marie Grosnay (Isobel Elsom). A sensible woman, she’s understandably creeped out by his rapid advances. Verdoux’s ongoing pursuit of this perfectly sympathetic character will be a second suspense motor powering the later part of the film.

Hitchcock-fashion, Chaplin has us unwillingly root for Verdoux to escape justice, some of the time. But he never makes the moral mistake of having us root for Verdoux to successfully kill. That stuff requires careful handling, and it gets it, even though we can still find fault with some of the choices. Instead, Verdoux’ homicidal plans create suspenseful fear on behalf of his prey, the appealing Mme. Grosnay and the awful, yet perversely likable, Annabella, played by Martha Raye.

Fiona notes that the dressmaker’s dummy establishes the unseen late Mme. Varney/Mademoiselle Couvais as a large woman. “Well, he had to run the incinerator for three days,” I reply.

Verdoux (above left) toys “seductively” with a flower, tickling his chin in EXACTLY the same way he does at the end of CITY LIGHTS, but the effect is decidedly different. His overeager gaucherie in launching himself so wildly at Marie Grosney suggests he’s not as efficient at this as we first thought — the idea of Verdoux as a somewhat inept Bluebeard is not pursued elsewhere.

Verdoux, in an excess of emotion, falls out of a window. Chaplin may have seized on a more verbal form than DICTATOR’s combination of slapstick and dialogue, possibly because he didn’t feel like falling down so much, but his tennis practice has kept him spry and he can still do it.

Does this betray a slight overanxiousness on Chaplin’s as well as Verdoux’s part, a need to reassure us that however “sophisticated” the drawing-room farce gets, there will still be pratfalls?

At any rate, Verdoux doesn’t score, and probably a good thing for him, because shouldn’t he be abandoning the Varney persona, to minimise the chance of his various crimes being connected by the police?

Chaplin finishes the sequence with his first use of a shot of locomotive wheels which will become extremely familiar as the film progresses…

TBC

The Death of the Arthur: Wilde and Crazy Guy

Blame the original Arthurian legends — a bunch of unrelated and mainly Welsh bits of history and legend that got gradually balled up together — for the aberrant spellings. But maybe blame TH White for repopularizing the aberrations just when things were settling down. By the 50s, everyone “knew” how to spell Merlin, so White made it Merlyn and somehow added a veneer of historical authenticity to his books, which otherwise rejoice in whimsical anachronism. The authenticity — White is very learned about everything from castle construction to falconry — makes the whimsy possible.

Anyway, here’s “Modred” in Cornel Wilde’s SWORD OF LANCELOT, monologuing to his tiny shoulder-pal. Is it technically a monologue if he’s talking TO someone, even if that someone is an intense-faced feathered shrimp perched on his anatomy? It definitely is.

“Modred” is imagined along the lines of Edmund in King Lear, an illegitimate son conspiring against a legit competitor, though here his rival is as yet only a gleam in Arthur’s eye. Having him here to plot helps push the guilt away from Lancelot and Guinivere, though how successful this will be as narrative poly remains to be seen.

“Modred” is played by Michael Meacham, who gets the kiss-of-death credit “And Introducing,” despite the fact that he’d been appearing on TV since 1952. He’s as close to the end of his screen career as to the beginning. Meacham voiced the role of Demetrius in the English dub of Jiri Trnka’s puppet version of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, long with prestigious types like Richard Burton, so I assume he had Shakespearian experience. Modred is conceived in villainous terms, but he doesn’t have Edmund’s depth or dialogue.

Anyway, Modred has hired an entire army of brigands — decidedly un-merrie men — to kill Guinevere, and Wilde delivers a nice atmospheric tracking shot across their latex-scarred faces lurking in the greenwood. So, just like in THE ADVENTURES OF SIR GALAHAD, we’re kind of grafting Robin Hood imagery into Arthuriana, but because the Arthur myth is authoritarian or arthuritarian, the outlaw-bandits have to be bad guys. It’s fine — you can do this, just as you can give Arthur a jester — it all fits in with the movie idea of medieval times, even if the legends go back to the Dark Ages.

After knocking the bandits for six — Guinivere lends a hand at the head-cleaving — the party arrives at the big village set. Camelot itself is a matte painting or photo pasted into the top right corner, a good distance off. As TH White explains early on in The Sword in the Stone, a village/town/city was always just outside the protective castle, and if a serious attack took place everyone just moved into the castle walls. Citadel as mini-city. Putting them this far apart serves no purpose. I get to see this principle inaction every time I take the bus into Edinburgh city centre: the High Street, the city’s first thoroughfare, descends the slope from the Castle Rock, the only avenue from which the Castle can be approached. Easy to beat a retreat inside and slam the gates, and you only have one side to defend. Unfortunately, not everyone has a bit of extinct volcano to build on.

Lancelot reassures the nervous king that G is eager to be his queen. Which he knows isn’t true as L&G have already fallen for each other. There’s that very striking line of Merlin’s in EXCALIBUR: “When a man lies he kills a part of the world.” A good line, it always made me feel that chivalric honour was an alien concept from another age — Is that true? I thought. It doesn’t FEEL true. But it’s striking.

Mark Dignam’s Merlin gets to present G to A. His is a thankless task in this film — if he can’t have any magic, what’s he good for? He knows about soap, this is the extent of his power. TH White’s Merlin seems to have almost unlimited power, but he has scruples that tell him when it’s appropriate to wizard things up. Boorman’s Merlin, as played by Nicol Williamson, breaks his own rules, which seem to establish the seeds of Camelot’s fall before it’s even begun. I think the best use of magic in fiction makes it clear that this shit is dangerous, to your health or your soul. But it’s better to HAVE magic in a mythic tale than NOT have it, surely? Do we want to have fun or don’t we? I was upset about TROY leaving out the gods, which are central to Homer, even if they’re very hard to render onscreen without cheesiness obtruding.

Per IMDb, filming on this was divided between Pinewood and Divčibare, Yugoslavia. There are some good castles in Serbia, for sure, but nothing I’ve seen so far looks like you’d have to leave the UK to find it. There’s a huge church interior for the wedding that somehow looks like a sound stage (overlit) but surely can’t be. Our cameraman is Harry Waxman, famed for THE THIRD MAN, although he probably only shot two-thirds of it, He hasn’t done anything atmospheric with light so far.

The script makes much of Guinevere’s youth, which is a little hard on Jean Wallace, who’s been in movies for more than twenty years. Medieval brides were often what we’d consider children, but you can have a forty-year-old Guinevere if you don’t keep insisting she’s a youngster. Of if you start the story later. I respect Wilde for sticking with his Mrs. though.

Hmm, the church is also the throne room and banquet hall and I guess they slide the two bits of round table, with its refectory chairs, in and out as needed, so it makes more sense that they might build it at Pinewood. Art director Maurice Carter also did BECKETT, and bits of those sets got recycled in MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, probably to better effect. And THESE sets supposedly got turned into Grand Fenwick in THE MOUSE ON THE MOON, Richard Lester’s unmemorable second film. I must do a comparison… (Lester’s challenge was to make the big sets look pokey and cheap, as befits the world’s smallest duchy. Later, he would turn down the chance to use Anthony Mann’s ROMAN EMPIRE sets for A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM.)

Good news — Adrienne Corri is Lady Vivian, Modred’s romantic interest. Her characteristic red hair (Corri was Scots-Italian) dyed black, she brings a touch of lustiness.

Then Lancelot has to go off and battle an army of Viking invaders. Again, I see no reason why you can’t have Vikings, since it’s never been really clear when Arthur’s story is meant to be set. And of course your movie Vikings should and must have horns on their helmets, even though horns is the one thing Vikings never wore. The battle is large, impressively mounted I guess, but somehow not ACTUALLY impressive. Editor Thom Noble would go on to cut FAHRENHEIT 451 and WITNESS. It just doesn’t get near the visceral feel of Kurosawa. But at least we don’t have extras catching spears with their hands and stomachs like in ZULU. The arrow hits are achieved by straight cutting: archer goes twang! — victim has an arrow in him and falls over. THRONE OF BLOOD has not been studied. CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT has not yet been made, to teach the lesson: get off the tripod, allow a little shake. It’s all expensively adequate.

But the shock cut from the full din of battle to a corpse lying in red muddy water is VERY strong. I tip my visor to Wilde once more. The water eats away at the man’s outline, making him look dismembered, and the contrast from LOUD to QUIET is even more striking than doing it the other way around might be. It forces the audience to catch its breath — each one of us becomes afraid of drawing ridicule with a sudden embarrassing noise.

It’s not certain that this sequence has any effect on any other part of the film’s story, however.

I should be able to finish the film in one more blog post. Sorry this is taking so long.