Muriel Box (1964)
Thirty-five years after his death, Harry H Corbett has the reputation of a major stage actor whose talents went largely to waste in screen work – thanks to the huge success he enjoyed in Steptoe and Son and the typecasting that followed. This thesis was successfully dramatised in the 2008 BBC4 TV film The Curse of Steptoe (directed by Michael Samuels from a screenplay by Brian Fillis). At the start of the film, Corbett (Jason Isaacs) is Shakespeare’s Richard II in a Theatre Workshop production at Stratford East: Joan Littlewood looks forward, once ‘you’ve got the histories under your belt’, to his Macbeth and, after that, ‘the Danish ditherer’. In January 1962, Corbett was playing Henry V at the Bristol Old Vic. He took a few days off to appear in ‘The Offer’, the prophetically named BBC Comedy Playhouse pilot that led to the commissioning of the first series of Steptoe and Son. It’s plain to see from Steptoe that Harry H Corbett was very gifted (he won the 1963 equivalent of a BAFTA for Best TV Actor for playing Harold Steptoe). Because of this and because of Corbett’s legend, I always keep an eye open for further evidence of how good he was. It’s a wild goose chase – the whole point of the legend is that such evidence doesn’t exist – but I keep hoping otherwise. So I recorded Rattle of a Simple Man when it was shown on ‘Talking Pictures’ the other day. Sad to say, Harry H Corbett’s performance in the lead is awful.
Muriel Box’s film is an adaptation, by Charles Dyer, of his theatre play of the same name, first staged in 1963. Except for the brief appearance of a third character, the play is a two-hander and takes place on a single set. Percy Winthram, a nearly forty-year-old virgin, has come down to London from Manchester with his pals to watch their football team play at Wembley. As the result of a bet with his mates, Percy ends up spending the evening with Cyrenne, a prostitute. Dyer’s screenplay expands the material by including multiple characters and settings, and a subplot involving Percy’s friend, the cocksure skirt-chaser Ginger. I don’t know the original in detail; perhaps it takes time on stage for the protagonists to show their true colours. But one of the film’s several disappointments is how little is revealed about either Percy (Harry H Corbett) or Cyrenne (Diane Cilento) in the course of the story. Box and Dyer begin with the football fans about to set off from a Manchester coach station. Percy’s mother (Thora Hird), with whom he still lives, appears on the scene and demands to see her son: he’s forgotten his scarf and she’s worried he’ll catch cold. Enough said. Cyrenne is a more complicated figure only in comparison with Percy. She’s introduced as a prostitute and Percy goes back with her to her rented room on that understanding. For much of the film, she shoots a line about her aristocratic connections and Oxford education. Percy eventually discovers that her Italian immigrant family runs a greasy spoon but the viewer is shown at a much earlier stage that Cyrenne’s social pretensions are a fiction.
An oddity of Rattle of a Simple Man, in view of when it was written, is that Charles Dyer makes Cyrenne’s background rather than her line of work the awful truth that must, in due course, be exposed. In the showdown argument between her and Percy that follows, he claims to be angry because she lied to him yet it’s the facts of Cyrenne’s family life that come across as her shaming secret. Dyer reworks the well-worn set-up of a lonely, sexually naïve man thinking he’s found the girl of his dreams only to discover she sells her body to other men: the heroine’s sex work and wrong-side-of-the-tracks upbringing in effect swap places in Rattle of a Simple Man. A corny, melodramatic scene in the kitchen behind her family’s caff announces that Cyrenne grew up being sexually abused by her stepfather. When, seeking to justify the untruths she’s told, she mentions this to Percy, he doesn’t show much sympathy. This isn’t a surprise: Percy is so narrowly written that any reaction at all to such shocking news would be outside the range Charles Dyer has given him. The revelation doesn’t shock the viewer much either because Muriel Box’s direction renders everyone in the film eccentrically innocuous – the crude lech Ginger (Michael Medwin), the minor criminals he gets briefly entangled with, and the cartoon Italian sexual abuser (George Roderick).
The twists and turns of the last twenty minutes are bewildering – they make no sense in relation to what’s meant to be happening in the relationship between Percy and Cyrenne. The coach back to Manchester is due to leave Victoria at midnight. There’s a train to Brighton at the same time and Cyrenne persuades Percy that they should go there together for a few days. As she’s looking for a suitcase, Percy takes the phone call from her stepfather that demolishes Cyrenne’s tall tale about her distinguished parentage. They have their row then are reconciled. Cyrenne invites Percy to come to bed. He agrees then, as he prepares to undress, takes off his watch, looks at it and exclaims in a panic, ‘I’ll miss me coach!’ He hotfoots it to Victoria. The coach is pulling out but Cinderella Percy gets the driver’s attention and is hauled on board by his mates. The coach goes past a hoarding on which the face of a beautiful girl is advertising cosmetics: her face turns in Percy’s imagination into Cyrenne’s. The same thing happens when he looks at a perfume advert in a magazine he’s reading. He realises his mistake, yells at the driver to stop the coach, jumps off and races back to Cyrenne. (The London of the film is remarkably easy to get across in no time.) He bursts into her room and exclaims, ‘I forgot me rattle!’ (His rattle is a comedy phallic symbol). Cyrenne smiles exultantly and the film ends. But why did he dash for the coach when they’d just made up and he’d already decided not to return to Manchester because they were going to Brighton together? The frenetic finale reeks of a clumsy attempt to introduce ‘action’ into Rattle of a Simple Man to prove it’s a motion picture.
Muriel Box and her sister Betty are among the subjects of Rebecca Cooke’s very interesting and enjoyable book Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties (2013). Cooke mentions Rattle of a Simple Man (‘a second-rate comedy’) only in passing but something else she writes about Muriel and her producer husband Sydney rings particularly true after you’ve watched this film:
‘The Boxes’ time had passed. They were middle-aged people at a moment when middle-aged people suddenly seemed very old indeed – a trend that the movies, as ever, ruthlessly exaggerated.’
Whereas Muriel Box was approaching sixty when she made Rattle, Charles Dyer was only in his mid-thirties but they combine, in opening out the play for the screen, to make the material stupidly condescending – especially in the soccer supporter element. Box inserts – for ‘realism’ – shots of an FA Cup Final crowd yet there’s not a hint of anyone in Percy’s party caring in the least what happens to their team at Wembley. Unless I missed it, we never know what does happen – though much of the film’s audience in 1964 would have been well aware that Manchester United had won the Cup the previous year. The northerners’ day trip to London is presented as an only-here-for-the-beer works outing.
According to Wikipedia, Sydney Box, having bought the rights to Dyer’s play in 1963, wanted Peter Sellers to play Percy but couldn’t afford him. It seems the Boxes saw the role as one designed for not merely an actor with comic skills but a comedy genius – and that may go some way to explaining Harry H Corbett’s playing of Percy. He’s all predetermined facial and vocal tics, and hyper-conscious of the camera – or the upper circle. It’s hard to tell what acting medium he thinks he’s in. He’s often stagy, though he hadn’t played Percy in the original theatre production (Edward Woodward did); some of his mannerisms channel Harold Steptoe as if this is what Corbett thinks is expected of him (it probably was, of course). You’d never guess from his exaggerated funny-Northern accent that Corbett was actually brought up in Manchester. Just occasionally, he’s quiet and you hope for something different. These moments, as well as being few, really are momentary.
Diane Cilento is miscast – she’s too upmarket and assured – yet her glamour and vitality make Rattle of a Simple Man easier to bear than it would have been with a transparently vulnerable Cyrenne. (Sheila Hancock originated the role on stage.) It’s a relief too that Cilento’s speaking voice doesn’t, of itself, make Cyrenne’s humble origins obvious albeit that Dyer’s words quickly give the game away. With Harry H Corbett in a performing world of his own, Cilento has an impossible task but at least she’s doing film acting – so too are Michael Medwin as Ginger and the strong-featured John Ronane, in his couple of scenes as Cyrenne’s genially permissive landlord. The three other members of Percy’s group are Hugh Futcher, Brian Wilde and Charles Dyer himself. He slows down each bit he features in; like Harry H Corbett, he’s elaborately unfunny.
11 June 2017
