Monthly Archives: February 2016

  • Who Done It?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Basil Dearden (1956)

    In 1951, T E B Clarke had his biggest success as a screenwriter, with The Lavender Hill Mob, for which he won an Oscar.  In 1959, the producer-director team of Michael Relph and Basil Dearden made the worthy racial crime drama, Sapphire.  In between, this trio joined forces on Who Done It?  One of the last Ealing comedies, this strange film also saw the big-screen debut of Benny Hill.  He plays Hugo Dill, an ice-rink sweeper who dreams of becoming a private investigator.  The dream immediately comes true when Hugo wins first prize – cash and a bloodhound – in a pulp crime fiction magazine competition.  As a sleuth, Hugo turns out to be as daft as he looks.  To quote Wikipedia, ‘His confused efforts to solve a crime lead to him becoming entangled in cold war espionage’.

    It’s a puzzle how Benny Hill landed the starring role.  It’s easy in retrospect to see the film as the fag end of Ealing comedies but the series was hardly in decline at the time Who Done It? was made:  its immediate predecessor, released only three months earlier, was The Ladykillers.   Benny Hill had worked on stage, radio and television but, on the evidence of his IMDB and Wikipedia entries, without becoming a big name in any medium.  Just turned thirty, Hill can hardly have got the part thanks to good or even comically eccentric looks.  Yet Charles Barr, in his book, Ealing Studios (1977), describes the picture as ‘a dull slapstick vehicle for Benny Hill’.  What’s he like an actor?  As Hugo Dill, he’s basically competent but bland and impersonal.  The convoluted plot of Who Done It? requires Hugo to get into a succession of disguises.  Doing these turns, Benny Hill is much more comfortable and amusing.

    Who Done It? is a film of its time in several ways.  A key location in the story is the venue for ‘The Radio Show’, an annual event which, for forty years, showcased the British radio industry.  There’s an ‘as Himself’ appearance by Jeremy Hawk, a short-lived high-profile television personality of the 1950s.  Well-known popular entertainments are in the picture to be laughed at, however.  The stars of the Holiday on Ice-type show that opens proceedings have to make fools of themselves; later on and more briefly, the Dagenham Girl Pipers are treated (although gently enough) as a bad joke.  The most interesting reflection of contemporary thinking – and anxieties – comes in the Cold War plotting strand of the story.  The bungling-nefarious lot that plans to destroy the British way of life, and which Hugo eventually thwarts, are a conspiracy of Eastern Bloc-heads and German scientists (David Kossoff, George Margo, Denis Shaw and Frederick Schiller).  There’s a truly bizarre sequence in which the ‘Royal Scientific Study’ of London (with Ernest Thesiger as its president) is given a vivid demonstration of how one of the scientists has devised means of changing the weather – from sun to snow and storm, from summer to winter and back – at the flick of a switch.

    The numerous slapstick sequences are always too long and the sort-of love interest element is really weak.  This is partly because Belinda Lee isn’t much of an actress but, to be fair to Lee, she’s not helped by the script.  Her character, Frankie, is a ‘strong girl’ – a female equivalent of a strongman – but T E B Clarke doesn’t exploit this inventively.  (Because Hugo – even though he’s already seen a show of her strength during the ice rink episode – mistakes Frankie for a physically weedy female, she takes a shine to him.   I think that’s the idea anyway:  it’s hard to see otherwise what Belinda Lee might see in Benny Hill.)  The broad acting in Who’s Done It? often makes it enjoyable, though.  Garry Marsh is alarmingly apoplectic as the police detective driven to distraction by Hugo Dill.  (Charles Barr describes the casting of Marsh as ‘reinforc[ing] the sense of a 20-year throwback to the [George] Formby days’.)  Much of the fun comes from spotting people in uncredited parts who went on to better or different things – Arthur Lowe especially but also Terence Alexander, Ronnie Brody, Harold Goodwin, Irene Handl, Glyn Houston and Ewen Solon.  Others in the cast, who do get credits, include Peter Bull, Charles Hawtrey and Thorley Waters. The bloodhound is called Fabian:  we wait a long time for a joke on this and it’s not worth waiting for (‘I’ve had to leave Fabian in the yard’).  IMDB records that the dog is played by Champion Appeline Hector of West Summerland.

    27 January 2016

  • Gangster Squad

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ruben Fleischer (2013)

    This film first came to prominence last summer.  It was due for release in September and the trailer was already showing in American cinemas.  This included part of a scene in which characters open fire with machine guns in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, shooting at the audience through the cinema screen.   After the Aurora killings, the trailer was pulled, the release date postponed and the cast reassembled in late August to shoot a sequence, set in Los Angeles’ Chinatown district, to replace the Grauman’s one.  Gangster Squad tells the story of the unorthodox methods used by the LAPD in the early 1950s to defeat the mobster Mickey Cohen.  Cohen is the dominant figure in the city’s criminal underworld; his tentacular operations are assisted by the number of local politicians and policemen he has on his payroll.  The LAPD chief William Parker creates a special unit to get Cohen – a small group of armed officers, led by straight-as-a-die Sergeant John O’Mara, a World War II veteran.  O’Mara’s men carry out a succession of raids designed to break down Cohen’s empire and get to the heavily-protected man himself.   To the Los Angeles public and press, the group appear to be vigilantes.

    Gangster Squad has finally arrived in cinemas at a time when Aurora has been eclipsed by the Sandy Hook shootings and the ensuing debate about American gun control laws, which the cinema murders didn’t spark (unsurprisingly, given the proximity of the killings to the presidential election).  In his robust defence of the ‘right to bear arms’, a week after Sandy Hook, Wayne La Pierre, the Chief Executive of the National Rifle Association, excoriated ‘sick’ violent cinema, of which Gangster Squad seems a pretty good example.  La Pierre had slasher movies in mind but a $75m Village Roadshow production, distributed by Warner Brothers, is arguably more offensive.   In the same 21 December statement, La Pierre also asserted that, ‘The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun’.  The ‘gangster squad’, which breaks the law in order to protect the law, is a demonstration of this principle in action.

    Gangster Squad is handsomely lit by Dion Beebe and a good deal of attention has been given to recreation of somewhat stylised LA settings.  There’s no real movement going on in these settings, however – except for the shoot-ups and beatings.  Ruben Fleischer seems to have taken the view that he doesn’t need any further animation of the action.  The violent episodes function the way that songs and dances (the choreography of the mayhem is important) often did in musicals of the period in which Gangster Squad is set:  the audience can rest assured that the next number will be along very soon.  There’s so much violence that I found I was closing my eyes more in boredom than because it was too tough to watch.   The screenplay by Will Beall is based on a series of articles which Paul Lieberman wrote for the Los Angeles Times called Tales from the Gangster Squad.  Mickey Cohen and William Parker, at least, were real people but the framing narrative (a voiceover by O’Mara) sounds like a parody of Manichaean gangster movies of decades past and the register of the movie as a whole suggests a comic book source.   It’s one thing to translate comic book material into live action in the cinema.  Using live action to reduce criminal history to a comic book story seems futile.

    This is Ruben Fleischer’s third feature, after a zombie comedy and an action comedy, and Will Beall’s first cinema screenplay.  You might not expect a work of art based on those CVs but what attracted the cast – and Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling and Josh Brolin in particular – to Gangster Squad?   As Cohen, Penn gives one of his rare bad performances.  He veers, as in Mystic River, from sullen quietness to explosive, yelling rage – a combination that makes him less powerful and expressive than usual.  As a cop who works hard and plays hard and joins the squad because he’s so upset by the Cohen gang’s killing of an innocent teenage boy, Ryan Gosling is wasted.  Unlike in Crazy, Stupid, Love. there’s no chemistry between him and Emma Stone.  (She plays an aspiring actress, Cohen’s moll and the Gosling character’s lover at the same time.)   Josh Brolin gets across O’Hara’s square-jawed rectitude without condescension.  Brolin’s squat phyisque allows him to be cartoonish without artificial aids; the same goes for Nick Nolte as Parker, yet his grizzled bulk and voice are ridiculous.  Other talented people wasting their time include Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Pena and Robert Patrick.  O’Hara’s wife is played by Mireille Enos:  she’s given to pronouncements like, ‘My husband isn’t much of a one for abstract thinking’ and Enos overdoes Connie O’Mara’s righteous exasperation at her man’s absolute determination to do the right thing.  She’s also involved in a scene which I think is more offensive than any of the explicit violence in the movie.  Cohen’s men fire a hail of shots at the O’Mara house one night when John O’Mara is out at work.  The heavily pregnant and terrified Connie tries desperately to take refuge.  When O’Mara returns home, he sees that the house is a crime scene and the bullet holes in the front door.  He pushes his way past the police and follows a trail of blood on the floor to the bathroom.  He and we see – as a rear view – Connie lying in the bath, and assume she’s dead.  In fact, she’s given birth to a boy, who’s in the bath with her.  Mother and baby are doing fine, although no one’s seen fit to attend to them – the baby is still streaked with blood from the birth.  But he puts out his hand to his father.  This is meant to be uplifting.

    10 January 2013

     

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