Dad’s Army
Oliver Parker (2016)
Several BBC comedies of the 1960s and 1970s became feature films that were dismissed by critics but did well at the box office – Steptoe and Son well enough even to spawn a big-screen sequel. Dad’s Army first became a movie at a relatively early stage of its television life: filming took place in the late summer of 1970, shortly before the third of the nine TV series was broadcast, and the picture was released in March 1971. In contrast, neither The Likely Lads nor Porridge returned to television screens after they’d become movies but this wasn’t because they’d failed as such. Much of the cinema audience for all four of these sitcoms would have realised they were weak distortions of the TV originals but would have felt too that they were, in every sense, harmless. And so it proved: the movies are long forgotten but the place of these shows in the TV comedy pantheon is secure. Because the BBC nowadays puts out an old episode of Dad’s Army what seems like every Saturday evening, it’s easy to take for granted. The best thing that can be said about this new cinema version is that it makes you cherish the television original. Henry Fitzherbert in the Express has it right: ‘There really is no reason for the film to exist’.
It was usual practice for a sitcom-turned-movie to find itself stranded in the great outdoors, and saddled with a plot that had thirty-minute legs but was required to do service for ninety. Studio-based TV sitcoms naturally tended to take place indoors and the best ones made a virtue of this necessity: the interiors reflected a claustrophobic element that was integral to the material. Porridge is only the most obvious example. The settings of Steptoe and Son and Fawlty Towers reinforced Harold Steptoe’s and Basil Fawlty’s sense of being trapped in lives of infuriating routine, and Dad’s Army comes into this category too. Although the series used a relatively greater range of locations, the Walmington-on-Sea home guard is based primarily in the church hall. That location is itself disputed territory, in a running battle with the vicar and the verger, but it is – to Captain Mainwaring’s occasionally voiced frustration – far removed from the World War II front line.
The plot synopsis on Wikipedia suggests that the first Dad’s Army movie edged nervously away from this crucial premise in order to up the ‘action’ quota for the big screen. Oliver Parker’s remake, with a screenplay by Hamish McColl, contradicts it extravagantly and inanely. The new film is set in 1944: Mainwaring’s men – and he particularly – foil a German plot to thwart the D-Day landings. There’s a fight-them-on-the-beaches climax, involving a U-boat, gunshots, explosions and barely a hint of this being a spoof-action finale. Before that, there’s a German spy to be unmasked. The spy’s identity is revealed to the audience immediately. She’s Rose Winters, a femme fatale posing as a journalist: Rose claims to be writing, for the Lady magazine, a profile of the Walmington home guard. Oliver Parker spends time (and money) on sequences that show the Nazi high command in Berlin in radio communication with Rose – as if ‘realism’ of this kind will help us suspend disbelief in the Germans’ belief there’s key British military intelligence to be gained from infiltrating Mainwaring’s platoon.
Parker’s film features a strong line-up of actors – assembled, it seems from the piece in Radio Times the other week, through one of those casting snowball effects: one biggish name hears that another has signed up, follows suit and attracts a third. You’re aware that you’re watching talented people but even more aware that they’re the wrong people. Playing a part made famous through a long-running TV show is very different from playing a character immortalised in a movie (although that’s problematic enough). With something like Dad’s Army, it’s not simply a matter of Arthur Lowe et al having made an indelible impression: as the series continued, Jimmy Perry and David Croft clearly wrote scripts with the particular actors’ characterisations in mind. The performances of the new cast are bound to be ultimately unsatisfying but the poor direction turns them into something worse and uncoordinated: in some cases, semi-impersonations of the originals; in others, attempts to resist impersonation, which make little sense. The famous Dad’s Army catch phrases occur at regular intervals, as if for moral support to the cast. The effect is increasingly desperate.
Toby Jones is a fine comic actor, who shares with Arthur Lowe a natural eccentricity and the ability to make that eccentricity funny by playing straight. Jones does some good comic business here, like choking on a piece of cake and struggling desperately to make nothing of it. I liked the moment when Mainwaring was walking down a dark street, attempting in vain not to be seen: two passers-by say, ‘Evening, Mainwaring’, and he says good evening back. But Jones is too thoroughly an underdog; his speech rhythms, gentler than Lowe’s, tone down Mainwaring’s pomposity; and he doesn’t build up enough military pretension. You’re especially aware of this when a deflated Mainwaring says, shortly before his climactic heroism, ‘I only wanted to do my bit’. Only wanting to do his bit is the impression Toby Jones has given throughout. Bill Nighy expresses Sergeant Wilson’s antipathy towards Mainwaring more blatantly than John Le Mesurier ever did. Nighy’s playing is tenaciously coherent but he makes Wilson charmless.
Tom Courtenay showed last year, in 45 Years and in his surpassing performance in Unforgotten on television, that his screen acting is as good now as it’s ever been. He’s surprisingly uncertain as Corporal Jones, although one of the few times I just about laughed was thanks to him: Mainwaring interrupts Jones and Mrs Fox on the sofa where they claim to be deep in a jigsaw puzzle; Courtenay gets to his feet hurriedly from the sofa and explains, ‘We were just doing a bit of sky’. Bill Paterson’s Frazer is weird. He’s just benign and rather distinguished until, in a brief, late outburst of Carry On comedy, he reveals to the Germans what Scotsmen don’t wear under their kilts. Although he plays Godfrey with finesse, Michael Gambon is too imposing for the role. (A particularly inept example of Oliver Parker’s direction comes when Jones is camouflaged as a tree and the weak-bladdered Godfrey mistakes him for the real thing: this is filmed in a way that makes it impossible to see how Godfrey could make the mistake.) The capable, naturally humorous Daniel Mays is OK in the attenuated role of Walker. Blake Harrison (The Inbetweeners) is hopeless as Pike – he seems to be sending up the character.
The few pleasures of the new film include seeing cameos from the original Pike and the only other survivor of the original cast. Ian Lavender has been amusingly elevated from private to the role of a brigadier. Frank Williams, who’s now eighty-four, is still playing the vicar: the effect is almost of a real person ‘as Himself’. Martin Savage is disastrous as the ARP warden. Bill Pertwee’s angry exchanges with Mainwaring in the television show always had a lovely, playground-name-calling quality: Savage comes across as merely nasty. The actresses in the TV Dad’s Army didn’t all make the same lasting impression as the actors. Pamela Cundell’s Mrs Fox was by far the best of them but Alison Steadman, who now plays the role, is welcome proof that having a hard act to follow isn’t an insuperable obstacle. Steadman’s saucy warmth, as well as being theatrically enjoyable, comes across as essentially truthful. In contrast, Felicity Montagu as Mrs Mainwaring has no act to follow at all – and, to that extent, an open goal, which she misses. It was a good running joke of the TV series that Mainwaring’s wife was a formidable presence in her husband’s life, in spite of never being seen. The film succeeds in achieving the opposite.
In a weedy subplot, most of the wives and girlfriends are members of a female home guard unit. As if Mavis Pike would be seen dead in such a group … Hamish McColl is not Sally Wainwright yet Sarah Lancashire tries to play Mrs Pike naturalistically: the result is jarring. Annette Crosbie and Julia Foster do pretty well as Godfrey’s sisters, worked up into a pair of mini-Miss Marples who identify the German spy long before the patronising men do. As Rose Winters, Catherine Zeta-Jones’s star glamour is mildly funny at first – it makes Rose all the more incongruous in Walmington-on-Sea. It’s hardly Zeta-Jones’s fault that she can’t find a stable tone as the film progresses: she’d probably have done better to play the character ‘Allo ‘Allo-style. It says a lot that the final shot – in which the frame freezes on Catherine Zeta-Jones’s shapely backside and the words ‘The End’ appear on screen – is one of the wittier things in Dad’s Army 2016.
11 February 2016