Daily Archives: Monday, March 7, 2016

  • Six-Five Special

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Shaughnessy (1958)

    Six-Five Special ran as a weekly show on the BBC from February 1957 until the end of December the following year.  This cinema spin-off was released about midway through the show’s lifetime, in March 1958.  The director, Alfred Shaugnessy, is best known as the main writer of Upstairs Downstairs.  Norman Hudis, who did the screenplay, went on to write several Carry On scripts, as well as for television on both sides of the Atlantic.  (He died just last month, at the age of ninety-three.)  The television programme went out live at five past six (until seven o’clock) on a Saturday evening.  It also took its name from the train that was shown speeding along during the opening credits.  The images were accompanied by a song performed by the show’s resident band, Don Lang and his Frantic Five:

    ‘The Six-Five Special’s comin’ down the line,

    The Six-Five Special’s right on time …’

    Words on the screen enjoined viewers to ‘Catch … the … Six-Five … Special’.  At the end of the credits sequence, the camera moved into the TV studio and the presenters, Jo Douglas and Pete Murray[1].  The latter opened the show with the announcement, ‘It’s time to jive on the old six-five!’  According to family lore, my ten-year-old sister always wanted to watch Six-Five Special but my father wouldn’t allow it.  She stole a few minutes each week while he walked round the corner to buy the evening sports press – my brother was posted at the window to see whether Dad was on his way back.  (This is an example of something I’ve heard so often that I now think I remember it personally.  I suppose I can’t, though – I was only just three at the end of 1958.)

    The cinema feature, as well as being good fun, is a genuinely interesting historical curiosity.  The storyline is purely a pretext for the performance of numbers by a variety of well-known solo singers and groups of the day – and the simplicity of the construction is very appealing.  Two flatmates, Anne (Diane Todd) and Judy (Avril Leslie), board a train – it sets off from Glasgow at 6.05, heading for London.  Bossy Judy is fed up with her drab bedsit existence and sure that diffident Anne’s singing talents will make her a star, and both their lives exciting, in the Big Smoke.  The other passengers on the train consist almost entirely of singers and comedy acts heading for the next day’s Six-Five Special show.  Pete Murray and Jo Douglas are also on the train; Anne is persuaded to audition for them; she lands a job on the show, just like that.  The later numbers in the movie are performed in the television studios, as part of the show being broadcast.

    The oddest part of Six-Five Special is its opening scene, in the flat that Anne and Judy share.  Anne is singing in the bath, Judy is sitting on the bed looking disgruntled.  The shots of Anne Anadyomene, although they may seem discreet to modern audiences, reveal more flesh than you’d expect in a 1950s U-certificate picture.  The frisson of daringness is reinforced by confusing editing, which occasionally gives the impression that Anne is addressing the love song she’s singing to Judy rather than to the man of her dreams.  It’s a bit of a puzzle too why these two Home Counties-sounding girls are in Glasgow on the first place – I guess the London train has to start somewhere.  Diane Todd, who plays Anne and is a stronger singing voice than she is an actress, didn’t go on to do much else on screen but enjoyed success in stage musicals for some years.  It may not be intentional but it’s nonetheless striking that, as a ‘bathroom soprano’ (as Anne describes herself) performing to her mirror, Todd is more glamorous than she ever is subsequently in the film, either in the sequences on the train or when Anne joins the Six-Five Special Team for a number on the TV show.

    The bits showing the youthful audience in the television studio include both shots of actual audience behaviour and animated reactions that are staged for the camera.   The former have a real dynamism.  This is remarkable not only in comparison with the faked expressions of dig-that-beat excitement but also because so much of the music on the soundtrack isn’t just innocuous but is performed by such middle-aged-looking soloists and combos.   It’s fortunate that the headline numbers in the studio, delivered by Lonnie Donegan, are by some way the most energetic.   The buzzy compering of Pete Murray (an excellent television presenter) helps too.

    The performers also include Dickie Valentine, Jim Dale, Petula Clark, Russ Hamilton, Joan Regan, The King Brothers, John Dankworth, Cleo Laine, The John Barry Seven (with Barry doing the vocals), The Ken-Tones, Mike and Bernie Winters, the dancer-choreographer Paddy Stone and his partner Leigh Madison, the ex-boxer Freddie Mills (a regular on the TV Six-Five Special) and a decidedly weird tartan-breeched Scottish teenager called Jackie Dennis.  Finlay Currie (also as himself) emerges from behind the copy of The Stage he’s reading in a train compartment to dispense advice about the theatre to Anne.  (She finds the advice confusing and I could see why.)  The camera goes into the train’s kitchen long enough for us to enjoy fine numbers from two black singers playing chefs – Victor Soverall and the vibrant Jimmy Lloyd.   The latter was an experienced American screen actor, and it shows.  Watching this strange collection of other big and not-so-big names of nearly sixty years ago, you feel gratified that Jim Dale, in particular, went on to a long successful career.  You also feel grateful that John Barry soon turned his attention towards writing and arranging songs for other people to sing.

    4 March 2016

    [1] The presenters changed during the course of the show’s two-year run.  Douglas and Murray were the original presenters.

  • High Society

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charles Walters (1956)

    At the start of High Society Louis Armstrong and his band – as themselves – are on a bus travelling to the society wedding at which they’re going to play.  (Their destination is, conveniently enough, Newport, Rhode Island, home of the jazz festival.)   Armstrong sings the film’s limp, calypso-ish title track then announces, ‘End of song, start of story’.  He also – chorus-like – gives you the background to that story and a hefty hint, even if you don’t already know The Philadelphia Story, of how things will turn out (and how you should want them to turn out.)   Armstrong and his companions might be saying to the audience, ‘We’re only here for the music and, let’s be honest, so are you’.   It’s hard to see otherwise why anyone would want to re-adapt Philip Barry’s play for the screen:   George Cukor’s 1940 movie is an almost perfect romantic comedy of manners but it can’t be denied that Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart don’t sing[1].   There are some good numbers in High Society (‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’, ‘Well, Did You Evah!’) and ‘True Love’ is a pleasant enough melody (although the lyrics are dreary).  It’s nevertheless the Cole Porter songs that are the real letdown of the film – because they’re the only thing you expect to justify the enterprise.   When there’s no singing going on, High Society just seems painfully inferior to The Philadelphia Story and you’re impatient for the next song.  When the song arrived I was usually disappointed by how far it was from Cole Porter’s best.

    Grace Kelly is pretty gruesome as the spoilt goddess-socialite Tracy Lord.  Vocally, she often seems to be doing a Hepburn imitation but you’re not always sure which Hepburn.  Kelly lacks the eccentricity that makes Audrey Hepburn’s cooing elocution charming; she has little of Katharine Hepburn’s edgy wit and none of her tensile variety.  The spectacle of a performer acting up emotional recklessness without feeling it isn’t edifying.  (It’s a mercy that, when Tracy gets drunk, Grace Kelly also acts sleepy, so becomes less irritating.)  At least Kelly looks great – whether in trousers or a bathing suit or a bridal outfit – although she looks better in single shots than she does moving about.  She’s such an effortless clotheshorse that, when Tracy emerges with a hangover into the glare of the morning after the night before and wails how heavy her wedding dress is, you don’t believe it for a moment.   There’s next to nothing going on between Kelly and Bing Crosby as C K Dexter Haven (the character has been rewritten here as a successful musician, chiefly to justify the Crosby-Armstrong and co number ‘Now You Has Jazz’).   Cary Grant’s Dexter used his debonair acerbity as a weapon; Crosby is so complacently relaxed that there’s no tension at all between the recently divorced Dexter and Tracy.   Crosby sharpens up only in the scene with Frank Sinatra that culminates in their ‘Well, Did You Evah!’ duet.  This comes over as an expression of the pressure of competition rather than characterisation but it’s rather gripping to watch.

    As in the original, the journalist Mike Connor arrives with his photographer-girlfriend Liz to cover Tracy’s wedding to a boring engineer called George Kittredge.  (Mike and Liz are allowed in because their employer, Spy Magazine, is in possession of embarrassing information about Tracy’s philandering father.)  In the Cukor film, James Stewart gives Mike a prickly integrity that makes his romantic capitulation, under the influence of alcohol and Tracy, very funny and charming.  In comparison, Frank Sinatra’s Mike is unvaryingly slick and shallow but his singing is so great that it’s hard to mind (and he does some amusing things – like the way he moves his wrist to indicate he wants a hair of the dog).   The most satisfying performance is from Celeste Holm as Liz.  She combines a quick-witted, wry ruefulness that Mike may look elsewhere for love with a contained determination that he won’t.   Holm (who is now ninety-three) was younger than Sinatra but looks a few years older.  This makes Liz’s passion for Mike more touching.  And their ‘Millionaire’ duet is the high point of the film.

    Lydia Reed, as Tracy’s younger sister Caroline, is a graduate of the performing seal school of child acting; oddly enough, this unbeautiful girl is physically convincing as Grace Kelly’s sibling.  John Patrick’s screenplay seems almost to forget about Caroline in the second half (I didn’t think the character disappeared from The Philadelphia Story in quite this way), although that’s no bad thing.  Margalo Gillmore gives a winningly low-key portrait of Tracy’s worried mother, a role which tends to encourage performances much more theatrically busy than this one.   In his last film (he died a few weeks before its release), Louis Calhern is surprisingly unfunny as the reprobate Uncle Willie.  Sidney Blackmer can’t do much with the pompous humourlessness of Tracy’s father; John Lund, in the thankless role of the jilted bridegroom George, manages rather more.   This was Grace Kelly’s last picture before she became Princess Grace of Monaco.  That’s obviously why I had the idea that High Society was set in Montecarlo, although the impersonality of the world before our eyes means that the story could be taking place anywhere or nowhere.  Charles Walters’s direction lacks flair, to put it mildly, and the opulent settings make for a limited colour scheme – very blue and fairly pink.

    11 June 2010

    [1] Afternote:  That’s not quite right.  Watching The Philadelphia Story again reminded me that Stewart’s character, in his cups, bellows his way through ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’.

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