Ken Hughes (1963)
In March 1958, the BBC screened a forty-minute play called Sammy. The Radio Times listing described it as follows:
‘A television play for one character
Written and produced by KEN HUGHES
Designer Norman James
Alone in his room, Sammy has three hours in which to raise the £200 that will save him from disaster. As the minutes pass he grows more desperate in his race against time, and in his attempt to forestall that fateful knock on the door …’
A few years later, Ken Hughes expanded this piece for cinema. The Small World of Sammy Lee runs 107 minutes; the timeframe for Sammy to repay his gambling debts became five hours; the amount of the debt was increased, to take account of either inflation or the big screen, to £300. Anthony Newley again played the title role – now supported by Robert Stephens and a cast of character actors already well known, or who would become well known, especially on television: the likes of Lynda Baron, Wilfrid Brambell, Alfred Burke, Julia Foster, Miriam Karlin, Roy Kinnear, Warren Mitchell, Derek Nimmo, Cyril Shaps and (an uncredited) Rita Webb.
The Small World of Sammy Lee has recently been shown by BFI as part of its ‘London on Film’ season. The screening was preceded by Nice Time, the 1957 documentary short by Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner, which describes a night in Piccadilly Circus from the early evening into the small hours. It’s a mark of how effectively Ken Hughes puts London on screen that the opening titles prologue to Sammy Lee – the camera moves through Soho as the place is waking up to the morning after the night before – followed the Goretta-Tanner film without coming off badly. From the start, the texture of Hughes’s locale is dynamic – this is true of the cafe, bar and club interiors as well as the streets outside. The film never looks like a piece that’s been adapted mechanically from a different medium. It does, however, sometimes look like a piece that began life in a shorter form and has been stretched a little thin: midway through, the sequences of Sammy running through streets in his quest for cash start to feel like padding.
Off-course betting was legalised in Britain in 1961 (we see a ‘licensed betting shop’ sign in one of the streets) but the bookmaker to whom Sammy owes money has methods of debt collection that are far from legitimate. Sammy knows that another client, who owes less than he does, needed twenty stitches in his head after a visit from the ‘razor men’ sent by the bookie (who is never seen). Sammy has a job, as compere at the Peep Show Club, a Soho strip joint, but it doesn’t pay well (£15 a week); in economic terms, it’s a sideline to his main occupations of spiv and gambler. His real surname is Leeman; his hard-working older brother Lou (Warren Mitchell) runs a Jewish deli in the East End. Sammy tries to borrow from Lou the £300 he needs but Lou’s wife Milly (Miriam Karlin) returns to the shop just at the wrong moment and puts the kibosh on that. Instead, a frenetic series of phone calls, appeals to other acquaintances and, for the last £50, the sale of a piece of furniture of sentimental value to Sammy, bring up the required total. Sammy’s dresser at the club, Harry (Wilfrid Brambell), rushes round collecting the money that’s due to be handed over to the bookie’s men (Kenneth J Warren and Clive Colin Bowler) by 7pm. Throughout the afternoon, Sammy returns to the Peep Show to do his MC routine – the strip show runs on an hourly cycle – and have a barney with the club’s owner Gerry Sullivan (Robert Stephens). Sullivan has taken on a new artiste that day – Patsy (Julia Foster), just arrived in London from Bradford. She’s a girl Sammy had a one-night stand with a few months ago, while he was out of town. He told her where he worked and to look him up any time she was in London, and that’s what she’s done.
A tension soon develops in The World of Sammy Lee between the formulaic surface and something harsher underneath. Sammy is on the brink of winning at poker then of backing a long-priced winner at Newmarket. Both times, his hopes are dashed at the last moment – as hopes of gambling success usually are dashed on screen. (The fact that they’re usually dashed in real life too is beside the point: the sequences are done here in a way to make you feel Ken Hughes knows he’s going through the motions.) It’s the same, much later on, when loyal, clueless Harry hands over the money to settle the debt – only for Sammy to find that half of it’s in the form of a cheque and even though he ordered Harry to accept cash only at his various ports of call. Before receiving this body blow, Sammy has told Patsy, after sleeping with her again, there’s no future for them together. He’s given her money to get a coach back to Bradford that evening. When he discovers he can’t settle the debt, Sammy makes a run for it: he jumps in a cab to join Patsy at Victoria coach station, the bookie’s heavies pursuing him in their car. Sammy is about to leave with Patsy when he’s told he can’t buy a ticket on the coach and must get one at the ticket office before boarding. The so-near-and-yet-so-far moment is, at least if you want Sammy and Patsy to end up together, emotionally effective but it too is par for the course in a story of this kind.
The eventual sale of the chair in Sammy’s bedsit, the chair in which he says his mother died, comes as no surprise either. As soon as Sammy, on the phone to a wholesale dealer who asks what price the chair, tells him it’s not for sale, you know that it will be sold. But this is rather different from the clichés above – selling the chair comes to seem inevitable rather than predictable, and we can see how the sale makes Sammy’s already low opinion of himself go lower still. Ken Hughes’s screenplay and direction are certainly erratic but details like the mother’s chair make it hard to tell whether he’s merely depending on overused plot twists in order to flesh out his short TV play or if he’s playing off conventions – and audience expectations – to try and create something more penetrating. That he succeeds in doing that is thanks largely to Anthony Newley; perhaps Hughes, having worked with Newley on the television Sammy, realised his lead actor had the potential to go deeper with the character.
Newley is an instinctive performer, who also exudes an anxiety to be noticed. He’s well cast as a line-shooter – a man considered shiftless by his brother and sister-in-law but who works hard at keeping up his bravado. Ken Hughes has written a good spiel for Sammy to deliver, with minor variations, at the start of each performance at the strip club: ‘Welcome to the Peep Show Club – and you’re welcome to it …’ is particularly effective because it’s so lame. (It’s impossible to deliver the line in a way that makes the second ‘welcome’ count the way it should.) Newley is very good at conveying Sammy’s weary contempt for his material, his job and, although he looks to be promiscuous, most of the women in his world. (Sammy seems to despise the strippers and clearly sees it as a point of honour that he shouldn’t accept a contribution towards payment of his debts from his neighbour Joan (Toni Palmer), because she’s a tart.) By the time he does the last Peep Show intro, Sammy has been fired. His nothing-left-to-lose outburst at the punters in the club may be another dramatic cliché but Newley vindicates it and his face at the coach station, when Sammy goes back to buy his ticket and is confronted by the sight of the debt-collectors, is extraordinary. Sammy has run out of places to run to; Anthony Newley seems to have stopped performing too. The coalescence of exposed character and unmasked actor is a compelling moment. Newley dominates the film but, in fact, there’s penetration and truthfulness from much of the supporting cast too – not just from good people like Julia Foster but also from relatively limited, over-insistent players like Wilfrid Brambell and Miriam Karlin.
The film’s title is curious. It may have been intended as an echo of the singular television comedy The Strange World of Gurney Slade, in which Newley starred in 1960. The ‘small’ immediately implies condescension towards Sammy Lee but turns out to mean more: the narrowness of the Soho streets that Ken Hughes emphasises in the opening titles sequence stays in your mind and starts to merge with Sammy’s feelings of being increasingly hemmed in. Hughes also stresses a row of dustbins in the prologue; this too has an editorial tinge but resonates when the dustbins reappear in the final sequence, in which Sammy is beaten up by the bookie’s men. The grimness of this finale makes it uncomfortable to watch but it’s right because Anthony Newley has consistently suggested the underside of Sammy’s quick wit and quasi-comic resourcefulness, as he does his urgent deals. The World of Sammy Lee is an odd film but I really liked it. The vital cinematography is by Wolfgang Suschitzky and the score, tenaciously supportive of the story’s shifting moods, by Kenny Graham.
29 July 2015
