Old Yorker

  • Carry On Sergeant

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gerald Thomas (1958)

    The title in this case is a phrase used naturally in the national service camp that provides the film’s setting.  When this first Carry On was made, no one had any idea that it would become a series – although it’s striking that Gerald Thomas and the producer, Peter Rogers, as well as plenty of the cast, were in from the start.  The opening credits refer, rather mysteriously, to ‘Carry on Sergeant by R F Delderfield’, with a subsequent screenplay credit for Norman Hudis and John Antrobus.  According to Wikipedia, the script was based on a stage play called The Bull Boys by Delderfield (best remembered now as the author of the novels A Horseman Riding By and To Serve Them All My Days, successfully dramatised on the BBC in 1978 and 1980 respectively).   The film is slightly interesting as a piece of social history (national service was discontinued in 1960) and more than slightly interesting as the start of something big in British screen entertainment, even though it’s inept and, for the most part, unfunny.

    As IMDB explains, ‘Sergeant Grimshaw wants to retire in the flush of success by winning the Star Squad prize with his very last platoon of newly called-up National Servicemen’.   (That summary doesn’t make clear that Grimshaw has never yet won the prize in all his years in the army.)   The platoon he’s saddled with suggests a lost cause:  its members include Kenneth Williams as a snooty university graduate; Kenneth Connor as a hypochondriac who’s into psychoanalysis; Gerald Campion (well known at the time as TV’s Billy Bunter); and Charles Hawtrey as Charles Hawtrey (his character is called Peter Golightly).   The squad must be comically incompetent and must end up winning the prize that Grimshaw yearns for.  You might expect some plot invention that sees them triumph by a series of outrageous flukes but nothing of the kind:  once they know what it means to Grimshaw, they simply pull themselves together and prove themselves completely capable.  I guess that in 1958 it may not have seemed a logical impossibility for the likes of Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey to pass muster.

    The platoon also includes Bob Monkhouse as a young man who gets his call-up papers during his wedding breakfast and whose devoted bride (Shirley Eaton) follows him to the national service depot and works in the NAAFI canteen there.  This sub-plot is perfunctory, to put it mildly, and it’s virtually abandoned by Gerald Thomas and the writers in favour of an uncertain romance between the weakling Kenneth Connor character and Dora Bryan as another NAAFI girl.  You wouldn’t expect Monkhouse, notoriously self-aware as a stand-up, to be a good actor and he isn’t:  his quick thinking is the most expressive part of him – you see him working out how to deliver a line well ahead of time.  He seems incongruous in this band of no-hopers:  when the army captain (Eric Barker) asks Monkhouse his name and number, then asks him to give the number backwards, he can’t – but you think that’s exactly the kind of thing Bob Monkhouse would manage with ease.  The unfunniest person around is, however, Kenneth Connor, who’s given the lion’s share of the comedy business and makes such a meal of it that he excludes any possibility of laughter.

    The performances that work fall into two categories essentially.  There are people who are simply good comedy actors – like Bill Owen, Norman Rossington and, especially, Dora Bryan.  There are also people like Williams, Hawtrey, Hattie Jacques (although she’s no great shakes on this occasion) and Eric Barker, who give pleasure in anticipation of what they became in the Carry On series.  Grimshaw is played by William Hartnell, a few years away from TV immortality as the first Doctor Who.  Hartnell is comically accomplished but too quietly believable most of the time – not enough of a martinet and not sufficiently frustrated with his men.  Yet the film’s ending, which seems meant to be genuinely heartwarming, rather vindicates Hartnell’s approach.  The cast also includes Terence Longdon and Terry Scott.   All in all, you end up feeling relieved that the Carry Ons fairly soon stopped trying to be pleasantly amusing and turned into dramatised seaside postcards.

    24 December 2011

  • She’s Gotta Have It

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Spike Lee (1986)

    She is Nola Darling – young, attractive and sexually independent.  Spike Lee places Nola and a trio of male suitors within the framework of a pseudo-documentary about her.  The characters speak to camera about their life and attitudes.  The interviews are juxtaposed with scenes that show how they actually interact.  Those scenes often reveal amusing chasms between the theory and practice of their lives.  Other talking heads include Nola’s father and a woman psychotherapist.  The BFI programme note for She’s Gotta Have It comprised excerpts from Tom Milne’s review in Monthly Film Bulletin and Paula J Massood’s 2003 book, Black City Cinema.  Both excerpts compare Lee’s structure, and his intention in using it, to what Kurosawa did in Rashomon.  It’s fair enough from a cinema history perspective but the comparison made me smile – just because the two movies are in other respects so different.  She’s Gotta Have It is deftly kinetic.  Spike Lee, who shot the film in just twelve days, displays a touch both light and sure.  The cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson, lights the images so as to deepen subtly the candid sexual comedy.  The film is in black and white, except for a vividly-coloured song and dance number midway through.  The musical rhythm of the actors’ voices is complemented by a jazzy score by the writer-director’s father, Bill Lee.

    This is technically Spike Lee’s second feature; the first, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983), was made while Lee was still in film school and submitted as part of his degree course.  The setting of She’s Gotta Have It is Brooklyn, where Nola (Tracy Camila Johns) works as a graphic designer; as Pauline Kael noted, the ‘basic set is Nola’s bed’.  The men with whom Nola shares it are Jamie (Tommy Redmond Hicks), Greer (John Canada Terrell) and Mars (Spike Lee).  Nola’s refusal to be a one-man woman is the film’s comic and satirical motor:  Lee has fun lampooning various male assumptions and expectations.  (By the end of the film, all three affairs have ended.)  Jamie is affluent, conventional and rather a drag but there’s a tension in some of the scenes between Tracy Camila Jones and Tommy Redmond Hicks that makes them distinctive.  The more obviously ridiculous Greer is upwardly mobile – or so he hopes; for him, that means putting distance between his racial identity and his social status.  Mars, who is unemployed and wears spectacles that seem wider than his body, has wit and lust enough to compensate for a lack of physical advantages and career prospects.  (Spike Lee comes over like a young, jive-talking variation of the classic Woody Allen persona.)  All the players are good though none of them, with the possible exception of Lee himself, is as loose and expressive in the main action as in their appearance as part of the closing credits – the cast introduce themselves in goofing curtain calls.

    9 December 2015

     

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