Monthly Archives: September 2020

  • What a Crazy World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Carreras (1963)

    According to a DVD review on the Amazon website, What a Crazy World happened because Joan Littlewood’s partner Gerry Raffles happened to see Joe Brown on television, performing what became the film’s title number.  Raffles liked what he heard and commissioned Alan Klein, who wrote the song, to develop a full-scale musical for Theatre Workshop.  The result was performed at Stratford East before morphing into Michael Carreras’s film, whose cast is a mixture of current pop names (Brown, Marty Wilde, Susan Maughan) and Theatre Workshop alumni (Harry H Corbett, Avis Bunnage, Fanny Carby et al).  Joe Brown plays What a Crazy World’s young East Ender hero, Alf Hitchens, who wants to get into the music business.  He hawks round Denmark Street in vain a song he’s written but does manage to get a dogsbody office job in London’s answer to Tin Pan Alley.  His music publisher boss there laughingly refers to Alf as ‘our budding Lionel Bart’.

    The early 1960s, thanks to Oliver! and Blitz!, were Bart’s West End heyday but the first show whose song score he wrote single-handed was Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be, which also began life at Theatre Workshop, in 1959.  That musical comedy and What a Crazy World have fings in common.  Bart’s piece (with book by Frank Norman), set in the 1950s, is peopled by Cockney spivs, Teds, tarts and dodgy policemen.  Klein’s principals are younger; Alf’s girlfriend Marilyn (Susan Maughan) and his sister Doris (Grazina Frame) have respectable jobs; but the boys, at the start, are out of work and may be on a slippery slope.  Alf’s best mate Herbie (Marty Wilde) looks set to emulate his many relatives who’ve done time – he sings about them in ‘Oh What a Family’.  With three other lads (Alan Klein, along with Barry Bethel and David Nott), Herbie also performs What a Crazy World‘s opener, ‘A Layabout’s Lament’, in the local labour exchange.  This echoes the jaunty, tongue-in-cheek, times-changing-for-the-worse thrust of Lionel Bart’s title song for Fings.

    Sad to say, it also makes for a shocking start to the film.  Carreras peoples the labour exchange with Africans, Arabs, Chinese and Indians, all in supposedly comical national dress – you can’t move in the place for turbans and burnouses.  ‘A Layabout’s Lament’ reads as a gruesome variation on the traditional anti-immigrant lament:  instead of ‘they come over here and take our jobs’, ‘they come over here and take our place in the dole queue’.  Except for a few teenagers of colour on the margins of a later sequence in a British Legion dance hall, the labour exchange men are the only non-whites seen throughout – never mind that the opening titles sequence is a crowded street scene, in a Petticoat Lane-type market.

    Present-day viewers will likely struggle to forgive or forget that first number – a pity because What a Crazy World is not only entertaining but an interesting piece of social history too, in more engaging ways.  As well as scenes shot on location in Denmark Street and by Cleopatra’s Needle, Carreras (who co-wrote the screenplay with Klein) shows the youngsters in, for example, an amusement arcade, a coffee bar, a cinema and a bowling alley – the last perhaps a nod to the lyrics of ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be’ (‘They changed our local Palais into a bowling alley’).  What’s more, Alf’s determination to get into professional songwriting must have played strongly to audiences of his generation as an especially appealing (and, by 1963, possible) escape route from dead-end jobs or no jobs at all.

    What a Crazy World may be indebted too, more unexpectedly so, to another contemporary stage success.  As in Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons (first produced in the West End in 1960), Klein’s musical has a Common Man figure (Michael Ripper).  He keeps popping up in different guises – a street vendor, a labour exchange jobsworth, the amusement arcade manager, the coffee bar owner.  Later on, he’s a spoilsport park-keeper and (out of character) an oldish bloke sitting behind Alf and Marilyn at the pictures, where he sentimentally earwigs on their romantic conversation.  The Common Man (he’s so named in the credits) is usually harassed – his mantra is ‘Bleedin’ kids’.  The film, in contrast, is, almost needless to say, firmly on the side of the younger generation (Alan Klein was only in his early twenties).  Alf’s parents, Sam (Harry H Corbett) and Mary (Avis Bunnage), spend their evenings as per the title song – ‘Dad’s gone down the dog track, mother’s playin’ bingo’.  That’s the first line of the chorus.  The third line – ‘No one seems to notice me, isn’t it a sin?’ – is, if anything, even more essential to the piece.  Alf’s tone isn’t at all self-pitying.  Even so, he wants to be noticed.

    ‘What a Crazy World (We’re Livin In)’ wasn’t a big hit when Joe Brown released it in 1962 (unlike his next single, ‘A Picture of You’) but this is the song Alf is trying to sell, and the film too depends on it.  A brass band is playing the tune in the opening market scene.  We see and hear Alf composing the number, strumming away on a banjo.  It accompanies the closing credits, with different characters each singing a line.  Oddly, though, what supposedly caught Gerry Raffles’s attention in the first place is never heard in its entirety, for all its superiority to the other songs.  Klein dutifully put together the required musical elements – an I-want-to-be-someone solo (‘Please Give Me a Chance’), a lovers’ tiff duet (‘I Feel the Same Way Too’), and so on.  Alf, Doris and their younger brother Joey (Michael Goodman) do ‘Bruvvers’, a lively, cheerful complaint about each other.  The Hitchens parents envy their kids’ relatively easy life in ‘Things We Never Had’.  All these are agreeable enough but the tunes are basic and the words no more than serviceable.  It’s the combination of social context and engaging performances that brings What a Crazy World to life.

    Except for Freddie and the Dreamers, who appear as themselves (or nearly themselves:  they’re billed as ‘Frantic’ Freddie and the Dreamers) at the British Legion dance hall, the pop stars in the cast need to act as well as sing.  Joe Brown, thoroughly natural and greatly likeable, is by far the most successful – he holds the film together with ease.  Marty Wilde does well too; compared with Brown, he’s delivering more of a turn but very ably.  Susan (‘Bobby’s Girl’) Maughan is wooden but her speaking voice is such an extraordinary concoction you’re almost glad it’s been recorded for posterity.  Maughan’s own vowel sounds (Birmingham via County Durham) keep intruding on her awkward attempt at a London accent.  More occasionally, she sounds mid-Atlantic or an English cut above her working-class East End character.  Perhaps Maughan is making the point that Marilyn (it’s she who sings ‘Please Give Me a Chance’) has aspirations.  Or perhaps that’s wishful thinking.  For their part, the experienced actors have to sing a bit – or speak sing.  Avis Bunnage does that very effectively in ‘Things We Never Had’, which cuts between Mary at bingo and Sam in the bar at the dog track.  Harry H Corbett has dynamism to spare throughout – he verges on the overpowering.  I liked Michael Goodman as Joey (according to IMDb, he hardly ever acted on screen again), the ever-reliable Fanny Carby as Mary’s friend and bingo companion, and Larry Dann, another Theatre Workshop regular, as one of Alf’s friends.

    As a piece of film-making, What a Crazy World is sometimes remarkably primitive.  The Denmark Street episode focuses so heavily on Alf getting chucked out of every place he tries that it’s a surprise when he turns out to have got the job with Solly Gold (Monte Landis).  The camera soars miles above Alf and Marilyn during one of their duets; image and sound are on the point of fadeout when Michael Carreras suddenly cuts to a near-close-up of the couple and the volume goes back up.  Near the end, a montage of newspaper headlines (‘Unknown writes number one hit’) seems to be revealed as a fantasy on Alf’s part:  he returns to reality with his chronically disparaging father telling him his song’s no good.  We never do get confirmation that Alf breaks into the big time.  Herbie and co meanwhile simply disappear from the story.  Carreras makes clear the show is over by having the main cast line up on the screen for a virtual curtain call – it seems a mark of desperation as much as an acknowledgement of the piece’s stage origins.  So What a Crazy World starts off offensive and ends up a mess – but I’m very pleased to have seen it.

    4 September 2020

  • What a Whopper

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gilbert Gunn (1961)

    ‘Please be advised that the following film features attitudes and language from a previous era which today may offend some viewers’, announces the jolly Talking Pictures TV voiceover, itself designed to evoke, more nostalgically, a bygone Britain.  The farcical comedy What a Whopper vindicates the warning in double quick time.  The very first shot is of a female backside, bouncing along a London street and thoroughly objectified:  the bottom’s owner’s face is hardly visible.  To make matters worse, the image is accompanied by the daft title song.

    I’d better explain why I was watching What a Whopper and that the title, double entrendre-ish as it is, refers chiefly to the Loch Ness monster, and the Nessie-related lie that drives the meagre plot.  I’m interested in British pop music as well as cinema of my childhood years – the late 1950s and early 1960s – and in the vogue then for films designed, to a greater or lesser extent, as vehicles for currently all-the-rage pop stars.  (I’ve recorded four of these from television recently.  Notes on What a Crazy World (1963), Tommy the Toreador (1959) and Expresso Bongo (also 1959) will follow.)  The driver of this particular vehicle was twenty-one-year-old Adam Faith, who’d had consecutive number one hit singles with ‘What Do You Want?’ and ‘Poor Me’, in late 1959 and early 1960 respectively.

    Faith plays Tony Blake, a London lad with an eye to the main chance.  Publishers keep rejecting Tony’s book about the Loch Ness monster.  He reckons this is because they don’t believe in the creature so he decides to fake evidence of its existence.  Thanks to his friend Vernon (Terence Longdon), an electronic music enthusiast, Tony gets some monstrous sounds to accompany photographs of the crummy Nessie model that they take, appropriately enough, in the Serpentine.  Along with Vernon’s girlfriend Charlotte (Carole Lesley), known as Charlie, the pair then set out for Loch Ness, to drum up local excitement and, Tony hopes, consequent interest in his manuscript.  On the road to Scotland, they pick up a French hitchhiker, Marie (Marie France), and let her in on the ruse.

    Once the action has moved north, the Nessie story gives way, for a while, to a subplot about salmon poaching.  Harry Sutton (Sid James), landlord of the Loch Ness hostelry where the rest of the film is set, and his partner, Jimmy (Ewan Roberts), have a load of fish to conceal from the police and keep moving it from one car boot to another.  One of the cars is the repurposed funeral hearse Tony acquires for his Scottish adventure.  The other is also a big black number, belonging to Charlie’s inebriated father (Freddie Frinton).  He’s followed his daughter from London on the instructions of his domineering wife (Fabia Drake), who’s convinced Charlie is heading for Gretna Green and marriage to the unsuitable Vernon.  Local law enforcement is represented by the predictably inept pairing of a bossy sergeant (Terry Scott) and his anxious, put upon underling (Gordon Rollings).  In other words, What a Whopper features plenty of well-known comedy performers; they also include Wilfrid Brambell and, back in London, Charles Hawtrey, Clive Dunn and Spike Milligan (as a tramp watching the Serpentine photo shoot).  Whether the ill-gotten salmon take centre stage to accommodate these comic talents or because the main idea is so thin is a nice question.  The answer is probably both.

    Familiarity was evidently important to the enterprise:  several of the cast are doing their usual thing.  Freddie Frinton was famous for his drunks.  Clive Dunn may be playing a petty bureaucrat serving an eviction notice on Tony for non-payment of his bedsit rent but Dunn is also performing his elderly dodderer act, years before Dad’s Army.  There’s another foreshadowing of the latter:  when Wilfrid Brambell tells the gathering in Sid James’s bar the terrifying story of his encounter with the Loch Ness ‘beastie’, he anticipates the doom-laden tales of John Laurie’s Private Frazer.  The presence of James, Charles Hawtrey and Terry Scott, on the other hand, naturally calls to mind the Carry On films.  So does the rampant political incorrectness.

    Carole Lesley, genuinely vivid in her dumb blonde role, first appears semi-nude as Charlie prepares to pose for an artist.  On arrival at the Scottish inn, where Marie alone books a room and the other three climb a ladder and negotiate a sloping roof to join her there, Charlie ‘accidentally’ loses her top making the ascent.  Marie has to think on her feet when, late that evening, Jimmy knocks on her door:  as Tony, Charlie and Vernon take cover, Marie tells Jimmy to wait a moment – she’s getting ready for bed.  When he enters the room, she’s in her bra and pants, holding a coverlet over her but standing with her back to a mirror … Jimmy’s exit line is ‘I’m very pleased to have seen you, Miss’.

    If What a Whopper is more egregiously sexist than racist it may be only because the ogling occupies more screen time.  There’s a single actor of colour, Lloyd Reckord, in a very minor role.  More surprising – startling – is the name of the used car dealer from whom Tony acquires the hearse.  The sign outside the premises reads, in big letters, ‘S LEGREE (The Honest Dealer)’.   It’s true that, thanks to my other main interest, I initially misread the first bit as ST LEGER but the mistake served to increase the impact of then realising the dealer shared his initial and surname (hardly a common one) with the murderous slave owner in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.   Gilbert Gunn was a Glaswegian but the film is arguably racist too even in its depiction of Scots.

    Lloyd Reckord’s character is Jojo, one of the variously bohemian tenants of the London house.  I couldn’t work out whether Jojo was meant to be the Charles Hawtrey character’s boyfriend but he’s certainly his friend so you’re bound to wonder – Hawtrey and girlfriends seldom went together.  Here he plays, believe it or not, a Jackson Pollock-type ‘splatter’ artist.  Maybe someone somewhere has done a thesis on the satirical subtext of What a Whopper as an expose of contemporary creative pretensions – and commercial opportunism around the Loch Ness monster.  The locals are ecstatic when Tony and his bogus evidence first appear on the scene.  Harry, especially, is delighted with the increased bar takings.

    Although he died young (sixty-two), Adam Faith enjoyed greater longevity as a screen actor than other pop star film leads of the era.  You can see why:  if he sometimes seems a bit underpowered in What a Whopper it’s because his playing is relatively naturalistic in a company dominated by full-on performers.  I’d not realised before quite how short Faith was (5’ 5”) but that helps give Tony a hint of vulnerability that enriches his chancer persona.  The rules of the sub-genre require that Faith sings a bit – two numbers by Johnny Worth.  ‘What a Whopper’ (which pinches bits of the tune of ‘Oh Dear! What Can the Matter Be?’) is garbage, ‘The Time Has Come’ more noteworthy.  A pretty, self-reproachful plaint (‘The time has come for me to hang my head in shame/The time has come for me to say that I’m to blame …’), it’s playing on Marie’s transistor radio, supposedly sung by Eden Charity.  Tony, vexed by the success of this latest hit-maker, complains he could do better himself.  Faith, charmingly, competes with his own voice.  What a Whopper opened in British cinemas on 17 October 1961.  By the beginning of November, ‘The Time Has Come’ had entered the charts, where it eventually reached number four.

    The set-up also appears to dictate that the star of the show, is, despite the (very) broad humour of the piece, exempted from looking too silly.  Tony briefly shares a bed with a Caledonian maniac (Archie Duncan).  Near the end, pursued by other locals who’ve got wise to his deception, he disguises himself as a kilted, false-bearded bagpiper.  Faith nevertheless keeps his dignity to an extent denied his co-stars.  The two girls aren’t the only ones to shed their clothes.  As he replaces his trousers after losing them for the nth time in the picture, Terence Longdon’s Vernon ruefully remarks that ‘It’s hardly worth putting them back on’.  Since What a Whopper is primitive and mostly inept, it’s damning with faint praise to say that Adam Faith is the best thing in it but he is.  To that extent, the people behind the film achieved what they set out to achieve.

    I laughed once, when Terry Scott, suspicious of the goings on at the lochside inn, says, ‘We’ll put this lot under surveillance’, and Gordon Rollings replies, ‘I’ve got a better idea:  let’s keep watch on them’.  And I kept smiling when Fabia Drake, informed that her daughter has gone off in a hearse, draws the logical conclusion and threatens to faint, with Charles Hawtrey ill-equipped to support her considerable weight.  (Not for the first or last time, Drake was playing a battleaxe.  She was a seriously good actress, though, as her late, great performance in The Jewel in the Crown proved.)  Gilbert Gunn directed only one more cinema film after What a Whopper (he died in 1967) but there’s no denying the writers went on to better – or, at least, better remembered – things.  The script was devised by Jeremy Lloyd (Are You Being Served?, ’Allo ’Allo!) and Trevor Peacock (Jim in The Vicar of Dibley and lots more:  he has a cameo here as a barrow boy).  It was then reworked by Terry Nation, who would soon graduate to Doctor Who.  By far the most illustrious cinema career ahead would be John Barry’s.  He’d already done a lot to bring about Adam Faith’s pop success and he arranged his numbers in What a Whopper.  That’s probably why the title song is, maddeningly, an earworm – as I’ve discovered in recent days.

    2 September 2020

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