Ken Hughes (1960)
Between their collaboration on the television play Sammy (1958) and its big-screen expansion, The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963), Ken Hughes and Anthony Newley worked together on two linked films that arrived in cinemas within a few months of each other in the first half of 1960. Wikipedia and IMDb both describe Jazz Boat, the first of the pair, as a musical comedy – a classification that hardly does justice to the farrago it actually is, in terms of both the tenor of the action and, especially, the musical content.
Under the opening credits, the titular boat seems to be at Tower Bridge but its destination is apparently Margate, in close proximity to Dreamland there. A gang of Teddy Boys led by Spider (James Booth) plan a jewel heist. They’re inexperienced and prove to be inept thieves but, though they’re played cartoonishly, their lawlessness isn’t entirely light-hearted: the flick-knives are real enough. The musical numbers are mostly by Joe (‘Mr Piano’) Henderson. After the title song accompanying the credits, the first of these is ‘I Wanna Jive Tonight’. It’s performed in a supposedly hot (though cool) jazz club setting but the look of most of the grooving cats goes with the song – making strenuous efforts to be to be hip, coming across as wholesomely square. The house band is headed by a very different sort of Ted – big band leader Ted Heath. His beaming, avuncular presence isn’t as incongruous as it should be.
Bert Harris (Newley) dances with ‘the Doll’ (Anne Aubrey), Spider’s girlfriend, and asks, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doin’ in a dive like this?’ ‘Easy,’ she replies, ‘I’m not a nice girl’, though her delivery makes it instantly clear that she is or, at least, that the very pretty Anne Aubrey isn’t an actress. Yet when Ken Hughes then cuts away from the dance floor to show Bert and her in the shadows, the effect is briefly quite tense and edgy – because the sequence depends for atmosphere mostly on what the camera picks up from Anthony Newley’s face. (By the way, Nicolas Roeg is credited as assistant cameraman, to Ted Moore.)
Bert is an electrician; the main plot takes off from his shooting a line to Spider et al that he’s a professional burglar. He soon regrets the empty boast but it’s too late to prevent the gang recruiting him to help with their robbery. The second half of the film divides its time between Bert’s desperate, comical attempts to escape the attentions of the gang – dressing up as a girl, and so on – and the efforts of the drily jaundiced Sergeant Thompson (Lionel Jeffries) to bring them to justice. This culminates in a violent confrontation between Thompson and Spider that, compared with most of what’s gone before, looks worryingly authentic. The story ends with the gang arrested and Thompson letting Bert off with a warning not to be a silly boy in future.
This picture was made just as Anthony Newley’s success as a solo artist in the British singles charts was reaching its peak. After two Top Ten hits in 1959 (‘I’ve Waited So Long’, and ‘Personality’), he had his first number one with ‘Why’ (a cover of the Frankie Avalon original) in the same month that Jazz Boat was released. ‘Do You Mind?’, which Newley wrote with Lionel Bart, topped the charts a few weeks later. With a screenplay by Ken Hughes, John Antrobus and Rex Rienits, the film is conceived largely as a Newley vehicle so there’s a lame in-joke – ‘I’m number one in the hit parade – they’re going to hit me’, Bert tells his girlfriend Rene (Joyce Blair) as he hurriedly exits through a window with the gang in pursuit – and a solo number for the star. This is ‘Someone to Love’, which Newley performs wandering around a beach deserted except for a passing tramp and a friendly dog. Although it’s by Joe Henderson, ‘Someone to Love’, as a plaintive whine, is a mild anticipation of ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’, the Bricusse-Newley power ballad in Stop the World – I Want to Get Off.
I don’t like Newley’s singing but you have to say at the end of Jazz Boat that he merited a vehicle – and something better than this leaky craft. He doesn’t exactly unify its tonal contradictions but he carries the film and manages the transitions of mood with remarkable ease. For the most part, he doesn’t overwork his natural little-guy underdog charm, which, as in The Small World of Sammy Lee, is allied to an interestingly strong expression of sex drive. The gang members also include David Lodge, as a weird character known as Holy Mike, and Bernie Winters, who plays ‘the Jinx’. Winters is meant to provide light relief but he’s so limited and tiresome he makes you doubly grateful for Newley’s versatility. That was reflected too in the second of the brace of 1960 Ken Hughes films – a prison comedy called In the Nick, in which most of the main actors in Jazz Boat reappear, usually playing the same character. James Booth’s Spider and Bernie Winters’s Jinx are now serving time in a ‘minimum security’ jail. Anne Aubrey’s Doll is a Soho stripper. Anthony Newley, however, is Dr Newcombe, a prison psychiatrist …
25 June 2019
