Monthly Archives: July 2019

  • Jazz Boat

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ken Hughes (1960)

    Between their collaboration on the television play Sammy (1958) and its big-screen expansion, The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963), Ken Hughes and Anthony Newley worked together on two linked films that arrived in cinemas within a few months of each other in the first half of 1960.  Wikipedia and IMDb both describe Jazz Boat, the first of the pair, as a musical comedy – a classification that hardly does justice to the farrago it actually is, in terms of both the tenor of the action and, especially, the musical content.

    Under the opening credits, the titular boat seems to be at Tower Bridge but its destination is apparently Margate, in close proximity to Dreamland there.  A gang of Teddy Boys led by Spider (James Booth) plan a jewel heist.  They’re inexperienced and prove to be inept thieves but, though they’re played cartoonishly, their lawlessness isn’t entirely light-hearted:  the flick-knives are real enough.  The musical numbers are mostly by Joe (‘Mr Piano’) Henderson.  After the title song accompanying the credits, the first of these is ‘I Wanna Jive Tonight’.  It’s performed in a supposedly hot (though cool) jazz club setting but the look of most of the grooving cats goes with the song – making strenuous efforts to be to be hip, coming across as wholesomely square.  The house band is headed by a very different sort of Ted – big band leader Ted Heath.  His beaming, avuncular presence isn’t as incongruous as it should be.

    Bert Harris (Newley) dances with ‘the Doll’ (Anne Aubrey), Spider’s girlfriend, and asks, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doin’ in a dive like this?’  ‘Easy,’ she replies, ‘I’m not a nice girl’, though her delivery makes it instantly clear that she is or, at least, that the very pretty Anne Aubrey isn’t an actress.  Yet when Ken Hughes then cuts away from the dance floor to show Bert and her in the shadows, the effect is briefly quite tense and edgy – because the sequence depends for atmosphere mostly on what the camera picks up from Anthony Newley’s face.  (By the way, Nicolas Roeg is credited as assistant cameraman, to Ted Moore.)

    Bert is an electrician; the main plot takes off from his shooting a line to Spider et al that he’s a professional burglar.  He soon regrets the empty boast but it’s too late to prevent the gang recruiting him to help with their robbery.  The second half of the film divides its time between Bert’s desperate, comical attempts to escape the attentions of the gang – dressing up as a girl, and so on – and the efforts of the drily jaundiced Sergeant Thompson (Lionel Jeffries) to bring them to justice.  This culminates in a violent confrontation between Thompson and Spider that, compared with most of what’s gone before, looks worryingly authentic.  The story ends with the gang arrested and Thompson letting Bert off with a warning not to be a silly boy in future.

    This picture was made just as Anthony Newley’s success as a solo artist in the British singles charts was reaching its peak.  After two Top Ten hits in 1959 (‘I’ve Waited So Long’, and ‘Personality’), he had his first number one with ‘Why’ (a cover of the Frankie Avalon original) in the same month that Jazz Boat was released.  ‘Do You Mind?’, which Newley wrote with Lionel Bart, topped the charts a few weeks later.  With a screenplay by Ken Hughes, John Antrobus and Rex Rienits, the film is conceived largely as a Newley vehicle so there’s a lame in-joke – ‘I’m number one in the hit parade – they’re going to hit me’, Bert tells his girlfriend Rene (Joyce Blair) as he hurriedly exits through a window with the gang in pursuit – and a solo number for the star.  This is ‘Someone to Love’, which Newley performs wandering around a beach deserted except for a passing tramp and a friendly dog.  Although it’s by Joe Henderson, ‘Someone to Love’, as a plaintive whine, is a mild anticipation of ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’, the Bricusse-Newley power ballad in Stop the World – I Want to Get Off.

    I don’t like Newley’s singing but you have to say at the end of Jazz Boat that he merited a vehicle – and something better than this leaky craft.  He doesn’t exactly unify its tonal contradictions but he carries the film and manages the transitions of mood with remarkable ease.  For the most part, he doesn’t overwork his natural little-guy underdog charm, which, as in The Small World of Sammy Lee, is allied to an interestingly strong expression of sex drive.  The gang members also include David Lodge, as a weird character known as Holy Mike, and Bernie Winters, who plays ‘the Jinx’.  Winters is meant to provide light relief but he’s so limited and tiresome he makes you doubly grateful for Newley’s versatility.   That was reflected too in the second of the brace of 1960 Ken Hughes films – a prison comedy called In the Nick, in which most of the main actors in Jazz Boat reappear, usually playing the same character.  James Booth’s Spider and Bernie Winters’s Jinx are now serving time in a ‘minimum security’ jail.  Anne Aubrey’s Doll is a Soho stripper.  Anthony Newley, however, is Dr Newcombe, a prison psychiatrist …

    25 June 2019

  • Balance, Not Symmetry

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jamie Adams (2019)

    In the final minutes of Balance, Not Symmetry, the young heroine Caitlin (Laura Harrier) reflects that, ‘Everything seems to be sorting itself out now after being a mess for so long’.  You can say that again.  Jamie Adams’s feature explores the impact of her father’s death on Caitlin, a final year student at Glasgow School of Art.  He focuses on her relationships with her mother Mary (Kate Dickie), also an artist, and Hannah (Bria Vinaite), her fellow student and longstanding friend.  Introducing his film’s world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), Adams acknowledged that he asked a lot of his actors in terms of improvisation.  Too much, in fact:  most of the time, the cast are like a stuck record.  They keep repeating phrases or slightly rearrange the words in them until they think up something else to say.  The effect is often banal; the scenes consistently lack dramatic shape.  At the eleventh hour, Adams realises he needs to bring things to a conclusion.  He introduces a dea ex machina – an established artist (Shauna Macdonald), who visits the final year exhibition and offers Caitlin the job of assistant on her next project.  What about Hannah, though?   She can have a job too, says the artist.  Simple as that!  The words quoted above are addressed by Caitlin to her father, when she visits his grave.  The film’s conventional, facile ending is in sharp contrast to what’s gone before.  After being a mess for so long, Balance, Not Symmetry suddenly and clumsily sorts itself out.

    Jamie Adams also explained – from the stage of the Festival Theatre, where his film screened as this year’s EIFF ‘People’s Gala’ presentation – that his mother died when he was nineteen and that he is ‘still processing’ the loss twenty years later.  His strong personal investment in the material may have got in the way.  There are moments in Balance, Not Symmetry unspecific enough to resonate emotionally with many viewers who’ve lost someone close – for example, when Caitlin and her mother sit on a beach, Mary says this was Caitlin’s father’s favourite place and the women gaze out to the vast, silent sea (although this combination is familiar enough to be a cliché).   For the most part, you suspect there’s plenty more in the film that means a lot to Adams but that he’s unable or unwilling to communicate this meaning to others.  For this audience member, it was a bit the same when he expressed his thanks to ‘Buffy Cairo – so much a part of my life since the age of twenty-four’.  Having never heard of Biffy Clyro (a Scottish alternative rock band, m’lud), whose songs supply the soundtrack, I thought Adams was talking about his life partner.  Some of the music does turn out to have emotional heft but of itself, not because of synergy with what’s on the screen.  Unless, that is, you’re Jamie Adams.  (Simon Neil, a member of Biffy Clyro, shares the screenplay credit with him.)

    The weakness of the improvisations registers most strongly when what the actor does makes no sense in terms of the character they’re playing.  It’s possible that Caitlin’s and Hannah’s art school teacher Fiona Miller (Tamsin Everton) doesn’t bother preparing her lectures and makes them up as she goes along; what comes over, though, is that it’s Egerton (who’s weak throughout) doing this.  When Caitlin’s mother views her daughter’s final show in Glasgow, Mary can’t find anything more to say than ‘that’s beautiful … that’s stunning’.  She expresses no curiosity about the work.  Her reaction is no doubt the best Kate Dickie could come up with but it’s vexing when Mary is a working artist.  From what she says, she might as well be an estate agent.  In the main role, Laura Harrier avoids such glaring lapses but her characterisation is vague.  Bria Vinaite (the young mother in The Florida Project), as if frustrated by the limits of her part, overplays it.  In a much smaller role, the talented Lily Newmark (Pin Cushion) is the best thing in the film.  She delivers her lines wittily and in a way that gives a hint – it inevitably remains no more than a hint – of a substantial personality behind them.

    Newmark plays Stacey, with whom Hannah has a short-lived affair at the same time that Caitlin is having one with Rory (Scott Miller):  these happen in the light of increasing tensions between Caitlin and Hannah (though their relationship isn’t evidently physical).  Both the main girls are American, Caitlin is mixed race – white mother, black father – and I understood that her family had returned only recently from the US to live in Scotland.  If Adams is suggesting that the protagonist’s nationality or ethnicity makes a difference to her situation, I failed to pick it up.  The conclusion to Balance, Not Symmetry is hurriedly cavalier.   Now reconciled with Hannah, Caitlin wants and gets assurance that her best friend will be accompanying her to London to work with the big-name artist.  Caitlin shows no interest, however, on the effect this may have on her mother, who had seemed to be on the verge of suicide even when her daughter went back to Glasgow to complete her studies.  As for Mary, she may have managed only a couple of words about Caitlin’s art but that’s two more than she has to say about this further major change in both their lives.

    23 June 2019

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