Film review

  • A Place to Go

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Basil Dearden (1963)

    Film vehicles for British pop chart-toppers in the late 1950s and early 1960s were often designed to reinforce the new star’s musical credentials as much as to further a film acting career.  An extreme example is The Tommy Steele Story (1957), which reached cinemas less than a year after Steele’s breakthrough hit, ‘Rock with the Caveman’, entered the charts.  The film dramatises Tommy-as-himself’s meteoric rise to teen idol, as well as featuring plenty of his singing.  What a Crazy World (1963) may be more typical.  The cast includes a few recently successful pop acts, including Marty Wilde and Susan Maughan, but the lead is Joe Brown, whose ‘A Picture of You’ was a number one single the previous summer.  Brown plays an unemployed working-class Londoner, Alf Hitchens, eager to break into the music business as a songwriter; even so, he sings the composition that he hopes will make his name (the film’s title song), and other numbers.  Shaky storytelling leaves it unclear quite how much Alf has achieved his ambition by the film’s end, but he has landed a job in the office of a Denmark Street music agent, so we take it he’s going the right way.

    In 1961 Michael Scheuer graduated with a BA from London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies.  A year later, as Mike Sarne, he was top of the British singles charts (just before Joe Brown) with ‘Come Outside’, memorably accompanied by ‘Little Doll’ Wendy Richard.  By early 1963, during the infamous winter of that year, he was doing location filming in Bethnal Green for A Place to Go[1], in which he played the lead.  Was Mike Sarne part of the current fashion for promoting pop stars as potential film stars?   Not really – and not only because he’d already done a fair bit of cinema and television acting (some of it seemingly while still a SSEES student) albeit the roles were uncredited or minor.  In A Place to Go, Sarne’s Ricky Flint is a young Cockney desperate for something more than a box room in his family’s cramped terraced house and work in a cigarette factory.  The film starts in a pub with Ricky singing the title song, to an appreciative audience that already knows him.  ‘A Place to Go’ is briefly reprised in the closing sequence and Sarne has sung a second number, ‘Out and About’, in the meantime.  But Ricky Flint’s dreams of a better life are less focused than Alf Hitchens’ and don’t depend on belief in his musical talents.  Ricky just wants out of Bethnal Green and turns to crime for the instant payday that can be his passport to more exciting places.

    Basil Dearden had already directed several films strongly dependent on their London settings – The Blue Lamp (1950), Pool of London (1951), Sapphire (1959), even The League of Gentlemen (1960).  The last three all involved his long-time producing partner, Michael Relph, as did A Place to Go, for which Relph also wrote the screenplay (with ‘additional dialogue’ by Clive Exton), adapted from Michael Fisher’s 1961 novel Bethnal Green.  Locale matters perhaps more in A Place to Go than in any of those other Dearden pictures.  A contemporary New York Times review[2] of the source novel thought ‘The best thing in the book – and this is a very good thing indeed – is Bethnal Green itself.  Mr Fisher moves through the streets of his district with such knowing assurance, observes its changes of light and season and weather with such precision, that in the end it is the feel of the place that remains in the mind’.  The same goes for A Place to Go, shot in black and white by Reginald H Wyer.  Dearden and Relph clearly set out to emulate the visual realism of British New Wave hits like Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961).

    This, alas, heightens the mismatch between visual design and the performances in A Place to Go – more specifically, a lack of orchestration of the acting.  I’ve seen enough Dearden films by now to realise how erratic he was in this department.  A director can’t alchemise a cast but a good one will show the actors to best advantage.  Among the four earlier films mentioned, Dearden signally fails to do that with some of the lesser-known players in Sapphire.  A Place to Go is different in that the cast members, well known or not, are mostly capable yet they seem to be performing in isolation from one another.  It doesn’t help that the best actor in the film, Bernard Lee, is miscast as paterfamilias Matt Flint, who shocks his family by suddenly leaving his job at the docks and trying his hand as a street entertainer – an escapologist – with ignominious results.  The miscasting isn’t a matter of Lee’s physical size and solidity, which makes Matt’s sweating and straining to break free of his chains (!) on the street the more gruelling to watch.  It’s rather that the character needs an emotional volatility that doesn’t come naturally to Lee, who therefore overacts to achieve this quality.  As Matt’s wife Lil, Doris Hare is fine when the dramatic stakes aren’t high but that’s increasingly less often as the story progresses.  Her husband dies suddenly; the Flints’ street is part of a slum clearance programme; the aftermath to a botched robbery involving Ricky lands him in hospital and, almost as soon as he’s discharged, up in court.  Doris Hare is the prime example here of a performer in a virtual vacuum.  Indomitable East End matriarch as she is, Lil Flint is worn down by the run of family misfortunes:  Doris Hare suffers not just nobly but slowly, too – to the disadvantage of whoever happens to be sharing the screen with her.

    The story’s central relationship is Ricky’s on-off romance with a feisty, flighty local girl called Cat Donovan, played by Rita Tushingham, in just her second film role after A Taste of Honey.  As usual, Tushingham is better when not speaking.  Ricky buys Cat a canary in a cage, from a market trader (an uncredited George Sewell, who appears for all of thirty seconds but still makes a good impression).  According to one of cinema’s golden rules, the caged bird has symbolic significance.  Cat wants to set it free; things don’t look good when the canary makes its way to a flat roof where a different cat is waiting but the bird manages to fly away:  as it does so, Rita Tushingham’s face is beautifully expressive.  Whenever Cat has a chunk of dialogue, Tushingham is much less natural but there is a connection – a welcome rarity in this film – between her and Mike Sarne.  The younger actors in smaller but significant roles – Barbara Ferris, David Andrews and William Marlowe – all do creditably.  Ferris is Ricky’s sister, Betsy, who’s living at her parents’, along with her lorry-driver husband Jim (Andrews) and their new baby.  Charlie Batey (Marlowe) – Cat’s in an on-off relationship with him, too – is a sidekick of Jack Ellerman (John Slater), the local Mr Big who recruits Ricky and Jim for the robbery at Ricky’s workplace.

    Neither Ricky nor Jim has been in trouble with the law before; both, for different reasons, need money.  Decent Jim, whose lorry will be the getaway vehicle, drops out on the eve of the robbery so Ricky decides to drive the lorry himself.  He creeps into the bedroom where Betsy, Jim and the baby are sleeping, and nicks the ignition keys from Jim’s trousers pocket.  During the robbery, Ellerman asks Ricky to stand guard and gives him a cosh to use if necessary; a bobby on the beat stops just outside the factory entrance where Ricky lurks in the shadows.  Ricky had no qualms about thieving but can’t go through with GBH or worse.  He makes a panicky escape in Jim’s lorry, which Charlie later that night sets on fire.  As Ricky tries to quench the flames, the tank blows up; the next we see of Ricky, he’s just a pair of eyes, a nose and a mouth emerging through bandages.  When he leaves hospital, his face scarred from burns, he calls on his mother in her new council flat before going to the pub and getting into a knife fight with Charlie Batey.  Up before a magistrate (Norman Shelley), both men claim that Cat is their girl; Ricky goes further by lying that he and Cat are engaged.  Cat is conveniently on hand to give testimony.  She looks at her two suitors in the dock and lies to save Ricky’s bacon.  The magistrate lets him off lightly; he’s bound over to keep the peace for a year and charged three pounds costs.

    Dearden and Relph were remarkably productive around this time, releasing two films in each of 1960 (The League of Gentlemen, Man in the Moon), 1961 (Victim, The Secret Partner) and 1962 (All Night Long, Life for Ruth).  They’d completed The Mind Benders just before making A Place to Go.  (In a sequence where Ricky and Cat go to the pictures, you can spot an in-joke poster for The Mind Benders.)  You can’t help thinking the pair were spreading themselves too thin, though:  A Place to Go is careless, in various ways.  Although the robbery goes wrong, there is a break-in at the factory and Charlie uses the cosh as Ricky couldn’t, though the policeman survives the attack:  there’s no follow-up to either crime.  Jim Ellerman once carried a torch for Lil Flint and says he’s always had a soft spot for Ricky:  the film seems to be preparing to reveal (as Michael Fisher’s novel does, according to Wikipedia) that Ricky is the crime boss’s son, but it doesn’t, and Jim Ellerman (well played by John Slater) just disappears from the story.  It’s clear that escapology is taking its toll on Matt Flint’s health.  He’s breathless on the street; when he and Lil return home to find Ellerman in conversation with Ricky, Matt gets angry, clutches his chest and keels over unconscious.  Bernard Lee collapses impressively but Dearden seems not to have pointed out to him that Matt isn’t meant to be suffering a heart attack.  (The hospital doctor who breaks the bad news to Ricky explains that Matt died of ‘a stroke and a brain haemorrhage’.)

    Dearden fares better with the relatively action-packed sequences – the factory break-in, Ricky’s fight with Charlie (which is particularly well done:  you can believe that other people in the pub join in, for the hell of it).  A scene at a dog track (Clapton Stadium) moves in ways few other scenes in the film do.  ‘It’s not the same as having your own front door’, laments Lil, when Ricky admires her new flat, way up in a tower block.  Jim and Betsy manage to get their own place with the insurance money for the lorry; Betsy says it’s nice ‘but a bit lonely’.  The message here is clear enough – hard-scrabble community making way for mod-cons anonymity – but another aspect of A Place to Go as social comment is harder to get a handle on:  this may be part of the film’s slackness but the effect is interesting.  The lenient magistrate expresses the hope that Ricky will ‘get married … settle down’, and that’s what he and Cat decide to do.  In the final sequence they run hand in hand towards Ricky’s old street, which they find being demolished.  On paper, the story’s resolution sounds thoroughly socially conservative – Ricky was wrong to dream big, is right to stay on his own modest patch.  But the closing shots, as he and Cat, hand in hand, pick their way through the rubble of the old street and head towards a high-rise block beyond – towards their future – is more ambiguous.   There’s a snatch of the lyrics from ‘A Place to Go’, and they now sound ironic.

    The film is such a weird concoction of styles and moods that you can only admire Charles Blackwell’s resourceful music – comically jaunty one moment, crime-thrillerish the next.  Blackwell, who worked with Joe Meek before becoming a highly successful music arranger and producer in his own right, had written ‘Come Outside’ the previous year and he wrote the two songs for A Place to Go ‘in collaboration with Mike Sarne’.  The film confirms Sarne as a likeable, not very brilliant singer and an engaging, unremarkable actor.  He didn’t carry on with the music for long.  He has continued to act over the decades but no more big roles.  Compared with Ricky Flint, though, Mike Sarne certainly went places.  By 1970, he was in Hollywood, directing Mae West and Raquel Welch in Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge.

    19 August 2025

    [1] Although dated 1963 on IMDb and by BFI, the film was released in Britain in early 1964.

    [2] https://www.nytimes.com/1961/08/27/archives/how-does-a-man-fit-into-the-brave-new-world-bethnal-green-by.html

     

  • I’m All Right Jack

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Boulting (1959)

    This Boulting brothers comedy was second only to Carry On Nurse at the British box office in 1959.  Plenty of those who bought tickets would already have been familiar with most of I’m All Right Jack’s main characters.  The picture became enduringly famous thanks to a newcomer – Peter Sellers’ Fred Kite, the hidebound, humourless shop steward – but Ian Carmichael, Dennis Price, Richard Attenborough, Terry-Thomas and Miles Malleson were all back in roles they’d played in the Boultings’ Private’s Progress (1956), which also did well commercially at the time.  I don’t recall having seen Private’s Progress and don’t think I’d seen I’m All Right Jack since I was a teenager.  Watching it now, as part of BFI’s Peter Sellers season (2025 marks the centenary of his birth), I was surprised by how laboured – no pun intended – the film is, and that I struggled to understand key parts of the plot.  I’m guessing that wasn’t the case for audiences in 1959 and was thanks partly to the now relatively obscure Private’s Progress.   

    Both films derive from novels by Alan Hackney, who worked with John Boulting and Frank Harvey on the screenplay for I’m All Right Jack.  According to the Guardian’s obituary of Hackney in 2009, Private’s Progress was inspired by observation of the ‘lead-swinging comrades and the upper-class twits who commanded them during [Hackney’s] wartime period at Maidstone barracks and at camps in India’.  The British army in World War II is replaced in I’m All Right Jack by post-war British industry, peopled by ineptly corrupt bosses, workshy workers and tunnel-visioned trade unionists.  This lampoon of late 1950s Britain extends beyond the workplace, too.  Fred Kite’s dumb-blonde daughter, Cynthia (Liz Fraser), has a job in the factory where her father plies his trade unionism; outside working hours, she’s usually reading inane film-fan mags or playing inane pop records.  Cynthia’s pastimes are dubious in ways the filmmakers maybe didn’t wholly intend.  Her reading matter smacks of the Boultings biting the hand that was feeding them; the single on her record-player is I’m All Right Jack’s title song, already played over the opening credits, sung by Al Saxon.  Written by Ken Hare, the song certainly is primitive although the lyrics express what apparently is the film’s political point of view – that contemporary Britain is deplorable because everyone’s out for himself.

    This is implied even in I’m All Right Jack’s curious prologue, where Peter Sellers appears in a second role – a cameo as elderly Sir John Kennaway, dozing in the otherwise deserted smoking room of a London gentleman’s club.  A waiter comes in to break the news that World War II is over; cheering is heard through an open window that Sir John asks the waiter to close.  A voiceover (E V H Emmett) enjoins viewers to ‘Look hard, for this is the last we shall see of Sir John’.  After reeling off his CV – Justice of the Peace, Chairman of this, Vice-President of that – the voice describes Sir John as ‘a solid block in the edifice of what seemed to be an ordered and stable society’.  As he heads for the smoking room exit, the voice concludes, ‘There he goes – on his way out.  For with victory came a new age, and with that age a new spirit’.  This is followed by newsreel footage of London’s VE Day celebrations – on the Buckingham Palace balcony, Churchill gives a V for Victory sign to the crowds below.  John Boulting then inserts a squaddie (Victor Maddern, who’ll shortly reappear as a factory worker) giving the camera a different V sign.  Cue the opening titles, jokey cartoon images accompanied by the theme song:

    ‘I’m all right, Jack, I’m OK

    That is the message for today

    So count up your lolly, feather your nest,

    Let someone else worry, boy,

    I couldn’t care less …’

    The juxtaposition of the club scene and those titles is disorienting.  As you watch the prologue, you think it’s there just to whet your appetite for a display of Peter Sellers’ chameleonic genius – and to make fun of the old codger in the club.  As soon as Al Saxon starts singing, you’re bound to wonder if we’re really meant to be nostalgic for the likes of Sir John Kennaway, never mind there’s been nothing to suggest he’s notably altruistic.  Isn’t this taking the film too seriously?  No, because, for all its popular success, this wasn’t Carry On Nurse:  I’m All Right Jack received plenty of critical praise as incisive satire, though it’s too slapdash to merit the description.  John and Roy Boulting (the latter, as usual, produced) probably did include that prologue just to showcase Sellers and probably didn’t truly lament Sir John Kennaway’s passing (not least because his type surely wasn’t extinct anyway).  He just seemed slightly preferable to what they saw as Britain’s emerging ruling classes.

    I’m All Right Jack‘s central character is Ian Carmichael’s Stanley Windrush (Alan Hackney could never have imagined that Stanley’s surname would be resonating decades on for different reasons).  Oxford educated but devoid of common sense, Stanley fancies a job in industrial management – nothing too onerous, mind – but is such a silly arse that he flunks every interview:  the recruitment agency tells him he’s not cut out for the world of business.  Stanley lives with his rich great aunt (Margaret Rutherford), whose son, Bertram Tracepurcel (Dennis Price), calls to see her one day, along with a business colleague, Sidney De Vere Cox (Richard Attenborough).  This duo, who served with Stanley in World War II, invite him to work at Tracepurcel’s factory, Missiles Ltd.  Stanley is thrilled until he learns it’s a blue-collar job.  He thinks that’s infra dig and Aunt Dolly is appalled at the prospect of a family member rubbing shoulders with the working class, but Stanley uneasily agrees to join his uncle’s firm.

    I spent most of what followed wondering why Tracepurcel and Cox were keen to engage Stanley’s services – despite the furtive meaningful looks exchanged by Dennis Price and Richard Attenborough as they make him the offer, and the nature of their cunning plan soon emerging.  Missiles Ltd has landed a big contract to manufacture arms for a country in the Middle East.  Cox owns another company, Union Jack Foundries.  He and Tracepurcel, in cahoots with the Middle Eastern government’s representative, Mr Mohammed (Marne Maitland), mean to procure the contract instead for Union Jack Foundries, at an increased production rate and thereby a hugely inflated cost that will net the trio £100,000, split three ways.  Missiles Ltd’s personnel manager, Major Hitchcock (Terry-Thomas), has commissioned a time and motion study.  Sucker Stanley, who spends his days in the factory at the wheel of a forklift truck, helpfully demonstrates to the T&M man, Waters (John Le Mesurier), that work can be done much more quickly if you load more on the truck in one go than he and the other drivers have been instructed to do.  On receipt of Waters’ report, management demands higher productivity.  Fred Kite calls a strike to protect his members’ rates of pay.  Missiles Ltd is in chaos – just what Tracepurcel, Cox and Mohammed were hoping for – and thanks to Stanley.

    This is where Private’s Progress knowledge must have come in handy.  Those acquainted with Stanley Windrush already knew him as a genial hopeless case with a talent only for guilelessly doing the wrong thing:  in the earlier film, by being honest, he ends up arrested for fraud, along with the actual fraudsters, Tracepurcel and Cox.  The premise of I’m All Right Jack is seemingly that Stanley is so reliably liable to cause chaos that the other two can count on it – there’s no other apparent reason to recruit him.  The cunning plan finally misfires, of course.  Tracepurcel and Cox are smart enough to be sure that Stanley will somehow wreak havoc but not smart enough to foresee that the workers at Union Jack Foundries will down tools in sympathy with their union brothers at Missiles Ltd.  The only motivation for another important part of the storyline – Fred Kite invites Stanley to lodge with him and his family, Stanley accepts the invitation because he likes the look of Cynthia – is that the Boultings need this set-up for what happens subsequently.  (A suggestion that Kite sees Stanley as a potential pupil, eagerly devouring the contents of Fred’s anti-capitalist library, comes and goes within a few screen seconds.)  The filmmakers’ only excuse for implausibility is that I’m All Right Jack is just-a-comedy-after-all.

    It’s not that funny, though.  Early on, there’s the strenuous humour of Stanley’s failed interviews:  at a washing powder company, where he asks an executive (John Glyn-Jones) just the wrong questions; on a tour of a confectionery factory, where Stanley is too polite to reject repeated offers from the supervisor (Ronnie Stevens) to sample the products, and ends up spewing the lot back into factory machinery.  At the film’s climax, Stanley causes a riot in a television studio.  By this stage, he has brought the country to the verge of a general strike and is a national celebrity.  When the union, led by Kite, sends Stanley to Coventry, he becomes a hero in the press – a man who’s being punished for working hard.  He appears, alongside Kite, Cox and Tracepurcel, on a live TV panel discussion programme chaired by (the real) Malcolm Muggeridge.  In the dressing room beforehand, Cox tries to bribe Stanley to resign, supposedly on health grounds, and presents him with a suitcase crammed with banknotes.  On air, the exasperated Stanley reveals the bribe and starts throwing the money around.  The studio audience, acquisitive to a man and woman, goes on the rampage trying to get their hands on the cash – a sequence that seems to go on forever.

    After the prologue, the film’s first scene takes place in the Sunnyglades nudist camp, where Stanley’s father (Miles Malleson) is a long-term resident and a group of much younger female nudists are keen but confessedly inept tennis players.  A tennis ball lands beside old Mr Windrush’s table.  Stanley, who’s visiting his father, is deputed to hand the ball back to the ladies; fully dressed and excruciatingly embarrassed, he reluctantly does so.  In I‘m All Right Jack‘s closing sequence, Windrush fils has joined his father as a Sunnyglades resident.  Stanley is quietly reading his newspaper when the tennis team invites him to join their game.  He’s last seen running for his life, wearing just the newspaper for cover, the giggling women in close pursuit – as if to suggest we’ve been watching a Carry On after all.

    The narrative is punctuated throughout by the familiar tones of E V H Emmett.  Best known as the voice of Gaumont British News, he gives the film’s leaden ironic commentary the right touch of pompous authority.  It’s fortunate that there are richer compensations to be had from many of the high-powered cast of I’m All Right Jack.  The film made a particularly strong impact because it skewered not only underhand management practices in British industry but also, and unusually, organised labour.  (It therefore came to be thought of as politically reactionary albeit the Boultings may have meant to be even-handed in their treatment of the two sides.)  And Fred Kite, who’s obviously crucial to this, is an unusual performance from Peter Sellers:  he supplies occasional glimpses of something vulnerably human behind Kite’s Hitler moustache, mangled English, and rulebook cant and cliches.  The solemn respect that Kite receives from his union colleagues is in short supply away from work.  At home with his candid wife (excellent Irene Handl), Fred’s an interesting combination.  He’s on the verge of henpecked yet rules the roost in the sense that Mrs Kite always has his dinner on the table the moment he comes in.  Until, that is, she loses patience with the strike shenanigans and goes on strike herself, leaving the house and her husband in the domestic lurch.

    It goes without saying Fred’s helpless without his wife, who has taken Cynthia with her.  A camera pan across the kitchen debris that has piled up in their absence is an unpromising start to what turns into one of the film’s most surprisingly appealing scenes, when Hitchcock, dispatched by Tracepurcel to negotiate with Kite, arrives at his house to find Fred in an apron.  Both men get something out of the meeting.  The shop steward comes up with the suggestion that Stanley leave Missiles Ltd for made-up ill-health reasons while the Major darns a hole in one of Fred’s socks.  In fact, this is the second nice tête-à-tête between chalk-and-cheese characters who find common ground.  Great Aunt Dolly has also paid a visit to the Kite residence, demanding to see Stanley while he’s still lodging there.  She starts off declining even to sit down, apparently nervous she might catch some dirty proletarian infection by doing so; she ends up on the sofa drinking tea with Mrs Kite.  These exchanges, as well as amusingly conceived, are a tribute to the actors involved, even if Margaret Rutherford and Terry-Thomas, at least, were doing just what audiences expected them to do.  It really shouldn’t be as enjoyable as it is to hear Terry-Thomas describing the Missiles workforce as an ‘absolute shower’, and so on.

    The film is cannily cast.  Stanley Windrush ought to be annoying but it’s impossible not to warm to the man playing him.  Ian Carmichael is game for anything, from his bilious routine in the sweets factory to his desperate closing business with the newspaper.  What’s so good about Carmichael’s performance, apart from his comic timing, is how deftly he registers Stanley’s distress every time he gets things wrong.  Stanley is so evidently a toff that it’s rather meaningless when he eventually confesses at work to being Tracepurcel’s nephew – or it would be without Ian Carmichael’s showing that coming clean matters to Stanley.  In the smaller parts, featuring a great many more familiar faces, Victor Maddern is particularly good.  With the qualified exception of Peter Sellers, whose versatility was sui generis, Richard Attenborough had a much wider acting range than anyone else in the cast.  Although Attenborough’s peculiar accent makes Sidney De Vere Cox interestingly hard to place socially, he’s a thin conception.  The following year, in Guy Green’s The Angry Silence, Attenborough would play a more substantial character in a more serious British film about contemporary industrial relations.

    16 August 2025

     

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