Val Guest (1959)
This musical satire takes sure aim at contemporary show business – as business – but it’s generous, as well as clear-eyed, in its treatment of types within the system – the hustling talent agent, the stripper taking singing lessons to further her career, the dyspeptic music industry executive, the star on the skids, the juvenile commercial hot property. Set in London’s Soho, Expresso Bongo started life on the West End stage in 1958 with book by Wolf Mankowitz and Julian More, and a song score by More, Monty Norman and David Heneker. Only three stage numbers made it into Val Guest’s film – which features new songs by, among others, Robert Farnon and Norrie Paramor – but Mankowitz did the screenplay, and it’s first-rate.
Johnny Jackson (Laurence Harvey), a small-time talent-scout-cum-theatrical-agent, goes with his girlfriend Maisie (Sylvia Syms), who performs in non-stop revue at a Soho club, to a nearby coffee bar where teenager Bert Rudge (Cliff Richard), singing and playing bongo drums, goes down a storm with the youthful clientele. Finagler Johnny persuades record company boss Mayer (Meier Tzelniker) to give Bert a recording contract. With less difficulty, Johnny also gets his unsuspecting protégé, whom he renames Bongo Herbert, to sign up to terms that give Johnny fifty per cent of all Bongo’s earnings. These are soon considerable, thanks to the boy’s meteoric rise in the pop charts, but things get complicated when fortyish American diva Dixie Collins (Yolande Donlan) arrives on the scene. Although she’s one of the best-known names in the Mayer stable, her career is faltering and she’s pitching desperately for a big new show in New York. Dixie takes a fancy to Bongo, who becomes part of the proposed American package and her lover, too. When she discovers how Johnny is exploiting him, Dixie intervenes. She succeeds in cooking Johnny’s goose but it’s a hollow victory. The transatlantic offer materialises but they want Bongo without Dixie. (It’s virtually a reversal of the protagonists’ fates in Sweet Bird of Youth, first produced on the Broadway stage in the same year this film was made.)
The opening titles sequence is ingenious. The camera moves round the neon signs, shop fronts and clubs of Soho by night; the credits are integrated with these. The names of Laurence Harvey, Sylvia Syms and Yolande Donlan are up in lights; other names appear on fruit machines in an amusement arcade (where Bert works until he becomes Bongo) or among girly photos in a shop window. A seemingly real audience watches a street sand dance. The sequence ends with Wolf Mankowitz’s walk-on as a sandwich-board man, his screenplay credit on the front board, the producer (Jon Penington) and director credits on the back. This introduction is a perfect indicator of how the film will work, fusing the reality of 1950s London with theatrical and verbal stylisation.
The cast mostly have a ball with Mankowitz’s witty, rhythmic dialogue – especially Laurence Harvey, whose Johnny Jackson is a fine example of a performance rooted in caricature that rises to another level. (Paul Scofield had played Johnny on stage.) Harvey uses hectic Jewish hustler mannerisms, vocal and gestural, to get his bearings but he engages with the role so thoroughly, and with such relish, that Johnny soon becomes intensely believable. The film’s Wikipedia entry (which is generally sniffy) and some user reviews on IMDb that include disparaging references to Harvey’s changeable accent are missing the point; Pauline Kael didn’t when she noted Johnny’s ‘amusing theatrical habit of adapting his speech to the accents of the people he talks to’. Considering how often people do this in real life (or did before Identity was sacrosanct), it’s surprising how rarely it happens on the screen. It’s an added strength and subtlety of Laurence Harvey’s acting in Expresso Bongo that he’s an exception to this rule. Harvey also, and crucially, makes the outrageous chancer that he’s playing likeable – as are most of the people in the film. Mankowitz and Val Guest, without seeming to approve their behaviour, recognise what drives it.
Wolf Mankowitz, from a Russian-Jewish background, grew up in the East End, the location of his well-received A Kid for Two Farthings. In Expresso Bongo, he uses the Yiddish idiom he knows so well in a different London locale where it also thrives. Worry is essential to the way of life of Mankowitz’s Soho businessmen, whether they’re running, like Mayer, an international showbiz agency or, like Leon (Eric Pohlmann), a salt-beef sandwich bar. This is a world in which a stomach ulcer is a proof of authenticity. When Johnny tells Mayer he has the condition, the latter wonders if this is, after all, a man he should take seriously. Mayer’s digestive unease and preference for classical music to rock and pop marry in the splendid lyrics of ‘Nausea’ (one of the numbers to survive from the stage show), in which he describes the effect of contemplating the prospect of Bert-Bongo’s success:
‘When I see this little bleeder and compare him with Aida – nausea, nausea!
When he gets his Austin Healey and thinks he’s as great as Gigli – nausea, nausea!
And when this geezer’s in the lolly if I take the risk,
He’ll make more than Barbirolli with some nauseating disc …’
(Since money-making means even more to Mayer than opera, he does take the risk.)
Another funny song – this one by Robert Farnon (music) and Val Guest (lyrics) and new for the film – is ‘You Can Look at the Goods but Don’t Touch’, performed by Maisie and the chorines in the sleazy revue club. The girls also perform to an arrangement of ‘Loch Lomond’, wearing tartan costumes that are strikingly skimpy (practically topless) for an ‘A’ certificate film of 1959. At first, Sylvia Syms seems a bit too classy but her warmth and empathy win you over: Maisie, loyal to Johnny but exasperated by him, is one of Syms’s most engaging characters. There’s a variety of good female portraits in Expresso Bongo. (The men in smaller roles make less impression, except for Eric Pohlmann and Barry Lowe, who does well as Beastie Burns, another of Johnny’s rock ‘n’ rollers.) Hermione Baddeley is delightful in the small part of a mature streetwalker called Penelope (waiting for her man). Ambrosine Phillpotts and Susan Hampshire are an amusing double act, as Dixie’s press agent Lady Rosemary and her debby daughter Cynthia. Avis Bunnage, whose first film this was, is excellent as Bert’s mother. It isn’t Yolande Donlan’s fault that the momentum slows once Dixie Collins takes centre stage: it’s just that you miss Laurence Harvey’s manic vitality when Johnny temporarily disappears from view.
Avis Bunnage’s playing of the worried, down-to-earth Mrs Rudge is more realistic than that of the others mentioned above but you don’t experience this as a lack of orchestration of the acting on Val Guest’s part. The difference serves to underline the distance between the world Bert has come from and the one he enters as Bongo. In any case, it’s a remarkable feature of Expresso Bongo that it easily accommodates repeated shifts in tone and style. Television personalities often appeared as themselves in British films of the era – in this case, it’s Gilbert Harding, doing a piece on espresso bars and the pop stars emerging from them for a Panorama-style current affairs programme – Cosmorama. Harding is pleasingly natural in the company of actors but there’s a comic sketch flavour to the bits he appears in – especially their culmination: a Cosmoroma studio panel discussion, also involving an anxious-to-be-with-it vicar (Reginald Beckwith), a stock cryptic psychiatrist (Patrick Cargill) and Johnny, who uses this television appearance for shameless Bongo-promotion. This short episode hardly fits with anything else in the film – except for sharing the sardonic energy that drives the whole story.
Cliff Richard’s presence complicates but enriches the picture. There’s now an unintended resonance to Bongo’s assertion that a serious girlfriend would get in the way of his career and when he tells a theatre audience he’s ‘a very religious boy’. Bongo announces this as he prepares to perform ‘The Shrine on the Second Floor’, a stage number (and from the stage Expresso Bongo) steeped in kitsch religiosity. This unctuous tribute to his mother is Bongo’s own brainchild – ‘a new kind of rock-with-mother song … a sort of Oedipus rock!’ His remark, though weird, is hardly surprising: the only women in Bongo’s life seem to be Mrs Rudge and Dixie, who’s old enough to be his mother.
When Expresso Bongo went into production, Richard had very recently become a music star. He may well have been cast to help the film commercially (Bongo was played in the theatre by James Kenney, an actor rather than a singer) but his actual celebrity gives the story an extra edge. ‘A Voice in the Wilderness’, the debut single that propels Bongo into the top ten, was one of four tracks on Richard’s Expresso Bongo EP, which entered the charts the month after the film’s release. The quality of his singing, especially of ‘A Voice in the Wilderness’ (a song I’ve always been fond of), also ensures that Bongo is more than a purely satirical creation – more, that is, than the latest good-looking, not very talented kid to hit the big time. The implication that Bongo will be a nine-day wonder is skewed, too, by Richard’s own show-business longevity.
He was only nineteen when he made the film and his lack of acting experience is plain. He doesn’t get inside the character and his line readings are particularly wooden when Bongo is spouting youth lingo. He insists he wants to play the drums rather than sing (though once he becomes Bongo, singing is all he does) because ‘I got the rhythm kind of natural, like’. Cliff Richard manages to make those words sound quite unnatural – the effect is odd when he really was a crucial part of the culture Bongo is meant to represent. He probably became a technically more competent actor in the lightweight pop-vehicle films – The Young Ones (1961), Summer Holiday (1963) and Wonderful Life (1964) – that he and the Shadows (who appear here as Bert Rudge’s support band in the coffee bar) would go on to make. Yet Richard’s physical presence in Expresso Bongo is strongly expressive. His still chubby face gives Bongo the right increasingly implacable quality. This naïve boy comes to realise his commercial potential – with that realisation comes a determination to call the shots. Without being explicitly callous, Bongo proves to be efficiently self-serving. Cliff Richard manages the transition persuasively.
It’s Laurence Harvey’s film, though, and he has the last word. Or words (they are ‘incorrigibly plural’). In the closing scene, Johnny has his suitcase packed, ready to return to the grind of regional talent-spotting. He promises Maisie he’ll phone her from Manchester. Then he bumps into the elderly owner of the club where she works, who’s planning to produce a stage musical about Omar Khayyam: he needs someone to play Omar’s girlfriend – ‘a sort of period Judy Garland’. ‘I just happen to have’, says Johnny, ‘under contract to me, an absolutely brand new, entirely gorgeous, all British, real, sensational Judy Garland!’ He abandons his luggage in the street and walks off with the club owner, spieling for all he’s worth.
The third number from the stage show that made it into the film was Johnny’s ‘I’ve Never Had It So Good’, a nod to Harold Macmillan’s best-known phrase (first used in a speech in July 1957, a few months after he became Prime Minister). In the week Expresso Bongo was released in cinemas, Britain’s number one hit single was ‘What Do You Want?’ (‘if you don’t want money’), sung by Cliff Richard’s exact contemporary, Adam Faith. The song it ousted from the top spot was ‘Travellin’ Light’, by Cliff and the Shadows. Expresso Bongo exudes zeitgeist. It’s also brilliantly entertaining.
15 September 2020
