Toffs

Farce, it is said, is simply tragedy at double speed. An Aldwych farce, on the other hand, might be called tragedy at half speed. But this proves no bad thing.

I knew nothing about the Aldwych farce tradition, except that they made films of some of them. Leslie Halliwell was a big fan. Oh, and Ben Travers, who write the plays, figures in an excellent story about Lindsay Anderson. Travers was celebrating his ninetieth birthday and somebody asked what he’d like on his tombstone. An urgent sort of question when you’re ninety. “I think I should put ‘And now the fun begins!'” said Travers. Lindsay Anderson was also there, so they asked him the same thing. “I think I should put,” said Lindsay, according to most versions of the story, “‘Surrounded by fucking arseholes.'”

That’s the version you mostly hear, but the version I was told by Anderson actor John Bett, I insist, was “STILL surrounded by fucking arseholes.” Much better, isn’t it? That way he’s not only insulted his putative graveside neighbours of the future, but his present company.

Anyway, I had little hope for my first Aldwych farce. I was unable to get copies of THARK or ROOKERY NOOK — a pity, I like those titles, so I settled for A CUCKOO IN THE NEST (1933). These early adaptations tended to be directed by star Tom Walls. Other members of the troupe are Ralph Lynn, Gordon James and Robertson Hare, but there are a couple of better-known thesps here too — Cecil Parker and Roger Livesey.

Are the Aldwych farceurs Awful British Comedians? I’m inclined to give them a pass. Hare is playing a vicar, which is always a drag, so I can’t say much for him. James is good fun in a minor character role. Lynn is a silly ass lead with a monocle who looks like he should be advertising cream sherry. He’s slightly awful, but somewhat skilled. When the material is there to support him, he can be rather good. And Tom Wall is very good indeed — he has the funniest character, which he apparently tended to play variations on throughout his career — a drink-fuddled retired major called Bone. Major Bone. His entire schtick is getting drunk, looking for drink, bemoaning the lack of drink, oh and being truculent. He has a fine line in truculence — I wondered if he might have inspired the more recent character of Count Arthur Strong a bit. There are also strong pre-echoes of The Fast Show‘s Sir Rowley Birkin too. I can understand people saying they don’t find him funny in other things, where he wants to be seen as a suave loverboy and it’s all rather unfortunate — but this is a comedy drunk for the ages.

Each of the characters has their single defining trait which you grasp at once and then get endless variations on. Most of them are quietly or loudly dotty. Each time a new one appears you have the fun of wondering for a second what his defect will be, and then you find out. There are some really fine stupid conversations in this, and what made me suspect I’d like it was Ralph Lynn, he of the screw-in monocle and raspy voice, assuring his wife that the train CAN’T be “nearly leaving” — trains are either leaving or they aren’t. Fatuous mansplaining, of course, but also nice comedy illogic.

The trouble with farce is that when it’s plot-driven it’s very hard to get laughs before the crisis has kicked in, but Travers shows this problem to be a false one: if your characters are rich and funny there are laughs to be got just from them manoeuvring through life. Of course everything gets better once you have a strong comic situation.

I’ve now watched a few of these and this one is still my favourite: things get a little icky once Lynn and Walls start behaving like sexual creatures. Neither one is somebody you want to think about being sexual. Here, Lynn’s whole story is about desperately trying to avoid the appearance of impropriety — he’s FORCED to spend the night in a hotel room with a nice French lady, and he HATES it. Major Bone has some grim moments of lustiness, but I found I could handle the discomfort.

Everybody in this is some kind of British archetypal lunatic, and there’s good angry fun had at the terrible inn, with its religious maniac woman in charge (Mary Brough) — shades of THE OLD DARK HOUSE, which it wouldn’t take much nudging to turn this film into. Escpecially since we have Alfred Junge as designer, making the pub look like a crooked charcoal sketch with floorboards laid in colliding swathes. Travers, like Val Guest, is very sex-positive but actually the funny stuff is a cold fury at the awful aspects of British life, and amusement at male sexual anxieties.

As director, Walls probably never became really fluid, but there are several moments when the fragmenting of the play, done to facilitate cross-cutting, gets actual laughs just by abruptly shifting scene. Directing cutting avant la nouvelle vague, delightfully unexpected in this slightly stolid film.

A CUCKOO IN THE NEST stars Fred Tutt; Darcy Tuck; Queen of Ardenberg; Dear Mr. Binky Rudd; Death; Louise Stoatt; Lord Loam; Cherry Buck; and Colonel Blimp.

Verdict: Walls and Lynn are awful when they’re being “sexy” but they’re very skilled farceurs.

That Uncertain Ealing

JOHNNY FRENCHMAN is a 1945 Ealing comedy-drama (dramedy? dromedary?) made to promote Anglo-French cooperation. 1945 might seem a bit late in the war for this to be needed, but films take time. Also, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH was made to promote Anglo-American cooperation and didn’t really come out until the war was ended. Michael Powell was told his film was needed, because “While we were losing we were all getting on OK. But now that we’re winning all the old resentments are coming out.”

Ealing is the studio of microcosm so they postulate two fishing villages, one Cornish and one Breton, where there’s rivalry and enmity — the French are always poaching the Brits’ crabs and so on. Tom Walls plays a harbour master and the great Francoise Rosay, who’d escaped from occupied France via North Africa and hitched a ride on a bomber, is an innkeeper and fisherwoman. Complicating matters, Walls’ daughter Patricia Roc falls for Rosay’s son Paul Dupuis (imported from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). Even the advent of war doesn’t totally clear things up between these folks, but eventually, of course, group unity, the prevailing Ealing virtue, prevails.

Written by T.E.B. (“Tibby”) Clarke (THE LAVENDER HILL MOB) and directed by Charles Frend (THE CRUEL SEA) this is very engaging, if not reaching the modest greatness of post-war Ealing. Walls is much better in character roles — he gives good performances in leading man parts, but he’s not an acceptable leading man. Vanity seems to have driven him to play dashing lovers well past the age he could pull it off. Inescapably fat and rumpled here, he’s settled into the mode than now suits him best — alas, he’d die four years later, a great loss to British movies.

(I encountered Walls as part of my research into Awful British Comedians, but I’ve yet to report properly on him. He is DNA: Definitely Not Awful.)

Walls essays what seems a creditable Cornish accent — maybe it’s not accurate, I can’t tell, but it’s consistent and sounds the part. Patricia Roc as his daughter can’t be bothered with any of that, nor can Ralph Michael as the local boy who’s wooing her. So the young folks let the side down a little. They’re less interesting than the senior characters, too, even though they ought to have all that Romeo & Juliet stuff going for them. I get the feeling working-class or regional accents were considered undesirable in romantic leads in the UK, with a few exceptions.

One of the developments at postwar Ealing is the rejection of romantic leads almost totally in their best films. Sir Michael Balcon was uncomfortable with any treatment of sex, and though the forbidden nature of the romance here provides the occasional mild thrill, it’s the sparring between Walls and Rosay that carries the interest.

Rosay is of course magnifique — wrestling with the English language seems to even improve her, since the right kind of obstructions often bring out the best in people.

Very nice location work, and the art department have done a great job transforming one Cornish village into a Breton one. There’s an egregious backdrop that’s used a little too obviously, but it hardly matters. Robert Sellers’ The Secret Life of Ealing Studios offers some amusing stories about the shoot: when Clarke was researching pilchards, one old fisherman told him, “Don’t know, m’dear. But ‘ee out in m’boat and show ‘ee a handsome bit ‘o coast for your back projection.”

Released the same year as DEAD OF NIGHT, this film doesn’t come close in terms of interest, settling for lightly likeable all down the line. A couple of people worked on both: Clarke did a dialogue polish on DON, while Ralph Michael is much more interesting in Robert Hamer’s haunted mirror story.

It’s a war picture where there’s no combat except a wrestling match, nobody dies, and there’s barely any life-or-death jeopardy except when a mine gets loose and floats into the harbour (Rosay to the rescue). This good old British restraint is interesting, and clearly deliberate. The film is very relaxing, which must have been the attempt — fresh air and mild peril as a relief from wartime tension.

Roc pool.

JOHNNY FRENCHMAN stars Laura Chapdelaine; Major Bone; Dilys; Peter Cortland; Duke of Burgundy; Kommandant Bernsdorff (The U-Boat Crew); Sister Bryony; and Shagal the Inn-Keeper.

Malicious Roomers

My exploration of the works of Herbert Mason continues. Lots of his films are unavailable so far as can see. BACK-ROOM BOY was a rare example of real cinematic flair being applied to the British slapstick film, and A WINDOW ON LONDON was a slick and graceful combination of slice-of-life realism and noir melodrama.

STRANGE BOARDERS is also very stylish in a Hitchcockian way. It’s the kind of spy romp he might have enjoyed, although making the hero a professional espionage investigator is something he’d probably have balked at.

Scene one: a little old lady is hit by a bus. Well, it gets your attention. When she’s discovered to have been carrying top secret blueprints of Britain’s newest MacGuffin, and investigation of her lodging house is clearly indicated, so ace spy Tommy Blythe (Tom Walls) is dragged from his honeymoon to go undercover. His wife, who doesn’t know about his covert work, is naturally outraged and suspicious, so she follows him — into the lions’ den!

I became fascinated by the plot’s close resemblance to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film L’ASSASSIN HABITE…AU 21. In both stories, an investigator goes undercover in a boarding house to find out which of the tenants is involved in an ongoing crime, and is joined by his wife, who shows up unexpectedly and without his agreement, determined to investigate on her own. In both stories there’s a blind man among the lodgers, and the denouement is strikingly similar in ways it wouldn’t do to go into without spoilering both films and their respective source novels.

For here’s the thing — STRANGE BOARDERS is based on a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Strange Boarders of Palace Crescent, while Clouzot’s film is based on L’assassin habite au 21 by Franco-Belgian crime writer S.A. Steeman. I call shenanigans!

Mason’s film scripted by the great Sidney Gilliat and A.R. Rawlinson, who worked on the first MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and was a genuine military intelligence officer in both the Great War and the one that was about to break out. They rejigged the plot quite a bit — in the very prolific Oppenheim’s book the hero is single, and is not an intelligence man, he’s more like the Hitchcockian amateur/innocent.

Steeman’s French novel appeared shortly after the British film, so he could certainly have seen it, if it were showing in France or if he saw it in England and could speak English. He couldn’t have been stealing from the book because the key elements common to both works are not in the Oppenheim original.

I can’t convict Steeman, who was a prolific and quite imaginative author (Clouzot’s magnificent QUAIS DES ORFEVRES is also based on a Steeman work, though apparently quite loosely as Clouzot couldn’t remember the exact plot and couldn’t find a copy of the paperback), but I thought I’d read synopses of his other works, since plagiarism is rarely a one-time crime unless the author is immediately caught. And indeed, Steeman’s Le Furet/The Ferret, filmed in 1949, does sound quite a bit like the film of Georges Simenon’s Picpus. Both involve anonymous letter-writers and a fortune teller, if memory serves. But stealing from Simenon, or from a recent adaptation of Simenon, would be far riskier than swiping from an obscure British thriller film. It looks like Steeman borrowed some plot elements but reworked them into his own pattern. He may have felt that’s what he was doing, legitimately, with L’Assassin…

Clouzot’s film doesn’t do much with its blinded prize-fighter, who is just a red herring, whereas STRANGE BOARDERS gets terrific mileage out of its sightless villain — in one scene, Tommy Blythe, standing stock-still to escape detection, is nearly given away by the soft ticking of his wristwatch, until he pokes his arm out the open window and it’s drowned out by traffic atmos. There’s also a fight in a darkroom — exciting stuff.

Kinky, too — Tommy playfully threatens his wife with a spanking, and when he captures one enemy agent, the ubiquitous Googie Withers, he has to enlist his wife’s aid to get her bound and gagged in the back of a car. Much is made of Renée Saint-Cyr stripping off Googie’s stoking to bind her ankles… Something Clouzot would have enjoyed, if he’d seen it, and would probably have insisted on swiping, but his film doesn’t have any equivalent of the Googie character.

Actually, the means by which Tommy gets this femme fatale out of a public night club, by insisting she’s his wife, also turns up in Edward Dmytryk’s Columbia B-movie THE BLONDE FROM SINGAPORE, made just a few years after STRANGE BOARDERS, but there may well be other movies that use that trope, which relies on the sinister assumption that the public will always believe a man over a woman.

I have been unaware of Tom Walls except for a vague idea about the Aldwych farces he produced on stage and directed on film. Now I’m starting to see them and he’s a fantastic comic actor, but perhaps a little long in the tooth for his role as a dashing bridegroom here. He’s an amazing and versatile character actor who wants to be a leading man.

Also featured: a nubile Irene Handl and Martita Hunt.

STRANGE BOARDERS stars Major Bone; Princess Isabelle; Helen Nosseros; Eldridge Harper; Lord Edgware; Mrs. Hudson; Tom Gradgrind; Sexton Blake; Alaric Chichester; Jellyband; Undetermined Role; Miss Havisham; and Joe Gargery.