Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • The Small World of Sammy Lee

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ken Hughes (1963)

    In March 1958, the BBC screened a forty-minute play called Sammy.  The Radio Times listing described it as follows:

    ‘A television play for one character
    Written and produced by KEN HUGHES
    Designer  Norman James
    Alone in his room, Sammy has three hours in which to raise the £200 that will save him from disaster. As the minutes pass he grows more desperate in his race against time, and in his attempt to forestall that fateful knock on the door …’

    A few years later, Ken Hughes expanded this piece for cinema.  The Small World of Sammy Lee runs 107 minutes; the timeframe for Sammy to repay his gambling debts became five hours; the amount of the debt was increased, to take account of either inflation or the big screen, to £300.  Anthony Newley again played the title role – now supported by Robert Stephens and a cast of character actors already well known, or who would become well known, especially on television:  the likes of Lynda Baron, Wilfrid Brambell, Alfred Burke, Julia Foster, Miriam Karlin, Roy Kinnear, Warren Mitchell, Derek Nimmo, Cyril Shaps and (an uncredited) Rita Webb.

    The Small World of Sammy Lee has recently been shown by BFI as part of its ‘London on Film’ season.  The screening was preceded by Nice Time, the 1957 documentary short by Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner, which describes a night in Piccadilly Circus from the early evening into the small hours.  It’s a mark of how effectively Ken Hughes puts London on screen that the opening titles prologue to Sammy Lee – the camera moves through Soho as the place is waking up to the morning after the night before – followed the Goretta-Tanner film without coming off badly.  From the start, the texture of Hughes’s locale is dynamic – this is true of the cafe, bar and club interiors as well as the streets outside.  The film never looks like a piece that’s been adapted mechanically from a different medium.  It does, however, sometimes look like a piece that began life in a shorter form and has been stretched a little thin:  midway through, the sequences of Sammy running through streets in his quest for cash start to feel like padding.

    Off-course betting was legalised in Britain in 1961 (we see a ‘licensed betting shop’ sign in one of the streets) but the bookmaker to whom Sammy owes money has methods of debt collection that are far from legitimate.  Sammy knows that another client, who owes less than he does, needed twenty stitches in his head after a visit from the ‘razor men’ sent by the bookie (who is never seen).  Sammy has a job, as compere at the Peep Show Club, a Soho strip joint, but it doesn’t pay well (£15 a week); in economic terms, it’s a sideline to his main occupations of spiv and gambler.   His real surname is Leeman; his hard-working older brother Lou (Warren Mitchell) runs a Jewish deli in the East End.   Sammy tries to borrow from Lou the £300 he needs but Lou’s wife Milly (Miriam Karlin) returns to the shop just at the wrong moment and puts the kibosh on that.  Instead, a frenetic series of phone calls, appeals to other acquaintances and, for the last £50, the sale of a piece of furniture of sentimental value to Sammy, bring up the required total.   Sammy’s dresser at the club, Harry (Wilfrid Brambell), rushes round collecting the money that’s due to be handed over to the bookie’s men (Kenneth J Warren and Clive Colin Bowler) by 7pm.  Throughout the afternoon, Sammy returns to the Peep Show to do his MC routine – the strip show runs on an hourly cycle – and have a barney with the club’s owner Gerry Sullivan (Robert Stephens).   Sullivan has taken on a new artiste that day – Patsy (Julia Foster), just arrived in London from Bradford.   She’s a girl Sammy had a one-night stand with a few months ago, while he was out of town.  He told her where he worked and to look him up any time she was in London, and that’s what she’s done.

    A tension soon develops in The World of Sammy Lee between the formulaic surface and something harsher underneath.  Sammy is on the brink of winning at poker then of backing a long-priced winner at Newmarket.  Both times, his hopes are dashed at the last moment – as hopes of gambling success usually are dashed on screen.   (The fact that they’re usually dashed in real life too is beside the point:  the sequences are done here in a way to make you feel Ken Hughes knows he’s going through the motions.)  It’s the same, much later on, when loyal, clueless Harry hands over the money to settle the debt – only for Sammy to find that half of it’s in the form of a cheque and even though he ordered Harry to accept cash only at his various ports of call.  Before receiving this body blow, Sammy has told Patsy, after sleeping with her again, there’s no future for them together.  He’s given her money to get a coach back to Bradford that evening.  When he discovers he can’t settle the debt, Sammy makes a run for it:  he jumps in a cab to join Patsy at Victoria coach station, the bookie’s heavies pursuing him in their car.  Sammy is about to leave with Patsy when he’s told he can’t buy a ticket on the coach and must get one at the ticket office before boarding.  The so-near-and-yet-so-far moment is, at least if you want Sammy and Patsy to end up together, emotionally effective but it too is par for the course in a story of this kind.

    The eventual sale of the chair in Sammy’s bedsit, the chair in which he says his mother died, comes as no surprise either.   As soon as Sammy, on the phone to a wholesale dealer who asks what price the chair, tells him it’s not for sale, you know that it will be sold.  But this is rather different from the clichés above – selling the chair comes to seem inevitable rather than predictable, and we can see how the sale makes Sammy’s already low opinion of himself go lower still.   Ken Hughes’s screenplay and direction are certainly erratic but details like the mother’s chair make it hard to tell whether he’s merely depending on overused plot twists in order to flesh out his short TV play or if he’s playing off conventions – and audience expectations – to try and create something more penetrating.   That he succeeds in doing that is thanks largely to Anthony Newley; perhaps Hughes, having worked with Newley on the television Sammy, realised his lead actor had the potential to go deeper with the character.

    Newley is an instinctive performer, who also exudes an anxiety to be noticed.  He’s well cast as a line-shooter – a man considered shiftless by his brother and sister-in-law but who works hard at keeping up his bravado.  Ken Hughes has written a good spiel for Sammy to deliver, with minor variations, at the start of each performance at the strip club:  ‘Welcome to the Peep Show Club – and you’re welcome to it …’ is particularly effective because it’s so lame.  (It’s impossible to deliver the line in a way that makes the second ‘welcome’ count the way it should.)  Newley is very good at conveying Sammy’s weary contempt for his material, his job and, although he looks to be promiscuous, most of the women in his world.  (Sammy seems to despise the strippers and clearly sees it as a point of honour that he shouldn’t accept a contribution towards payment of his debts from his neighbour Joan (Toni Palmer), because she’s a tart.)  By the time he does the last Peep Show intro, Sammy has been fired.  His nothing-left-to-lose outburst at the punters in the club may be another dramatic cliché but Newley vindicates it and his face at the coach station, when Sammy goes back to buy his ticket and is confronted by the sight of the debt-collectors, is extraordinary.   Sammy has run out of places to run to; Anthony Newley seems to have stopped performing too.  The coalescence of exposed character and unmasked actor is a compelling moment.  Newley dominates the film but, in fact, there’s penetration and truthfulness from much of the supporting cast too – not just from good people like Julia Foster but also from relatively limited, over-insistent players like Wilfrid Brambell and Miriam Karlin.

    The film’s title is curious.  It may have been intended as an echo of the singular television comedy The Strange World of Gurney Slade, in which Newley starred in 1960.  The ‘small’ immediately implies condescension towards Sammy Lee but turns out to mean more:  the narrowness of the Soho streets that Ken Hughes emphasises in the opening titles sequence stays in your mind and starts to merge with Sammy’s feelings of being increasingly hemmed in.   Hughes also stresses a row of dustbins in the prologue; this too has an editorial tinge but resonates when the dustbins reappear in the final sequence, in which Sammy is beaten up by the bookie’s men.  The grimness of this finale makes it uncomfortable to watch but it’s right because Anthony Newley has consistently suggested the underside of Sammy’s quick wit and quasi-comic resourcefulness, as he does his urgent deals.  The World of Sammy Lee is an odd film but I really liked it.  The vital cinematography is by Wolfgang Suschitzky and the score, tenaciously supportive of the story’s shifting moods, by Kenny Graham.

    29 July 2015

     

  • The Purple Rose of Cairo

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (1985)

    An odd way to end the last nineteen days, which have included nine visits to BFI to see Woody Allen films.  This was the only one of the nine without him in it:  The Purple Rose of Cairo was the second of his movies and the first comedy in which he didn’t appear (the previous non-appearance was Interiors).  This was also the only one of the nine films I strongly disliked – a surprise as well as a disappointment.  This is one of Allen’s most widely admired pictures (at the time of its release Pauline Kael reckoned it ‘the most purely charming’ of his thirteen features to date) and it’s a lovely idea.  Cecilia, a woman living in New Jersey during the Great Depression who gets her only pleasures from watching show after show at the local cinema (the Jewel), finds her world transformed when Tom Baxter, the pith-helmet-wearing archaeologist hero of the latest film she sees there (‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’), spots her in the theatre audience – for the third time that day and the fifth all told – and steps down from the screen and into her life. Tom’s romantic impulse is a showstopper for all concerned.  The audience has nothing to watch but the other members of the movie’s cast sitting around bitching about their co-star’s irresponsibility and waiting for him to return so the action can resume.  Gil Shepherd, the ambitious actor who plays Tom Baxter, flies from Los Angeles to New Jersey to try and sort things out and this is the trigger for an unusual love triangle – involving Cecilia (played by Mia Farrow), Tom and Gil (both played by Jeff Daniels).

    Woody Allen is more interested in the jokes that the situation offers than in a rigorous working out of it.  Movie bosses in Hollywood are worried Tom’s walkout is going to spark an epidemic of similar behaviour in screenings of ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’ across the country but there’s no indication of what the commercial consequences of that would be.  What happens at the Jewel doesn’t bring crowds flocking to it but doesn’t empty the movie theatre either.  The audience there seems to be as stranded as the other actors in ‘The Purple Rose’, kvetching about the stasis on screen.  This casual approach to the logic of a film’s premise isn’t unusual in Woody Allen, though, and sometimes adds to a film’s charm (as in Love and Death).  What’s objectionable in The Purple Rose of Cairo is Allen’s treatment of the Depression.  It’s one thing to illustrate the vital importance of movies as escapism during the period but Allen reduces the Depression to the context of the movies so that, for example, the groups of unemployed men at the margins of the action are little more than set dressing.  But one unemployed man is treated very differently – Cecilia’s slob husband Monk, who abuses his wife verbally and sometimes physically, and is unfaithful to her when he gets the chance.  This character might be crude in any setting; his brutality is jarringly incongruous within the film’s attenuated world.  You can sense Danny Aiello’s discomfort in the role but Woody Allen shows Monk no mercy: there’s not a hint that it’s his situation that might be bringing out the worst in him.  (In the scheme of the movie, it’s almost as if Monk is a thug because he doesn’t go to the movies enough.)

    The best things in The Purple Rose of Cairo are Cecilia’s two suitors.  There is some suspense in which of them Cecilia will eventually choose and the intersection of their two personalities provides the film with its best moments and its most interesting theme.   Gil Shepherd – at first and at last – is vain, anxiously preoccupied with his reputation and career prospects, but, when he’s in a music shop with Cecilia and sings ‘I’m Alabama Bound’, accompanying himself on a banjo, Jeff Daniels hints at a sweetness of nature in Gil that chimes with Tom Baxter’s thoroughgoing affability.  The effect is genuinely charming and you understand, as Gil sings, Cecilia’s confused feelings about him and Tom.  Woody Allen seems to be speculating here about what actors bring of themselves to their roles – and perhaps raising the question of how much a character on screen is the creation of the writer who conceived him or the actor who interprets him.

    In the case of Cecilia, however, this idea gets muddied – largely because of what Mia Farrow meant to Allen at the time.  Farrow gave some good performances working with him but she’s arguably not strong enough to play the lead or hold a film together (although she manages to in Rosemary’s Baby, where her waiflike vulnerability is integral to the momentum of the story).   Mia Farrow can play comedy but she isn’t an instinctive comedienne the way Diane Keaton or Dianne Wiest is – she isn’t funny in herself.   In this film Woody Allen doesn’t seem to expect her to be funny – he rather assumes that she’s delightful.   In the early scenes we see Cecilia working as a waitress in a diner:  she’s so inept, as she yatters film facts and gets orders wrong, that I soon found myself sharing the proprietor’s impatience with her but Woody Allen clearly feels that Mia Farrow beatifies the role she’s playing.  I suspect he also thinks that his feelings about her exclude the possibility of condescension in his treatment of Cecilia but, if so, he’s wrong.   Cecilia eventually chooses Gil in preference to Tom – reality over fantasy – but Gil has tricked her.  (When Tom loses Cecilia, he returns to the other side of the screen and allows Gil’s career to continue.)  At the end, Cecilia is presented as virtually Chaplinesque – the pathetic, plucky little loser – a persona which Woody Allen has always, thank goodness, resisted for himself.

    With the exception of Daniels and Karen Akers (as the club chanteuse with whom Tom Baxter falls in love on screen before deserting her for Cecilia), the actors playing actors in the stalled movie – Zoe Caldwell, Edward Herrmann, Milo O’Shea and John Wood – are archly knowing and unfunny.  Although Dianne Wiest brings a bit of friction to the role of a prostitute who takes Tom to the brothel where she works, the scene there fizzles out because, once Woody Allen has delivered the essential joke (Tom is of course utterly innocent and the hookers are incredulous), he has nowhere to take it.    The film is treading water until Tom Baxter breaks the fourth wall and the dialogue is sometimes so calculated to be charming that it’s deadly.  Tom hears what Monk does to Cecilia and says that if he got the chance he’d punch her husband in the face.  ‘Oh, would you really?’ asks Cecilia.  ‘Yes’, replies Tom, ‘it’s part of my character’.    Other lines, which might well be funny issuing from Woody Allen, are rendered cute spoken by Mia Farrow, as when Cecilia describes Tom to a friend:  ‘He’s fictional but you can’t have everything’.

    As Gil heads back to Hollywood, his guilty feelings about deserting Cecilia momentarily come through; Jeff Daniels’s darkening face gives the film a shot of emotional truth that cuts through the sweetly sad fantasy and is almost mysterious.  The Purple Rose of Cairo should have ended at this point but Woody Allen has to return to Cecilia, once more in her seat in the Jewel, her life back to dreary normal but even sorrier than it was before because of the exciting interlude.   Then Top Hat comes on the screen and her face lights up.  That’s a very natural reaction to Top Hat but this conclusion – because Allen is so focused on Mia Farrow’s luminous hopefulness – comes across less as an illustration of how movies could (still can) banish the blues than as a sentimental underlining of the idea that Cecilia can find happiness only in make-believe.

    21 January 2012

     

     

     

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