John Paddy Carstairs (1959)
One of the first songs I remember hearing on the wireless as a child – and looking forward to hearing again – was ‘Little White Bull’, sung by Tommy Steele. It was a top ten hit around Christmas 1959, when Tommy the Toreador, with Steele in the title role, also opened in British cinemas. ‘Little White Bull’ is among the film’s half-dozen or so numbers, written by Lionel Bart, Mike Pratt and Steele, and by far the best. The plot of this musical comedy involves a London seaman who goes ashore while his ship is docked in Spain, inadvertently saves the life of a famous bullfighter, gets mistaken for same, and faces a formidably angry bull in the ring.
This was Steele’s second starring screen role (following the previous year’s The Duke Wore Jeans). As sailor Tommy, he sings, dances, acts comical and grins, all with gusto. He’s irrepressible and you’re soon longing for someone to repress him. His energy is what the set-up requires of course but it’s a set-up tailored to Steele’s already established persona. His playing here is the polar opposite of the relaxed, natural acting of pop contemporaries like Adam Faith in What a Whopper (1961) and Joe Brown in What a Crazy World (1963). Steele makes a performance of everything – each line, each movement, each facial expression. He’s exhausting.
Like the two What films, this one now seems benighted, though in a different way. British package holidays to Spain were just getting underway in the late 1950s. Tommy the Toreador reflects an era when nearly everywhere abroad was still hilariously alien. You get the condescending message even in the supposedly respectful legend at the start: ‘Our grateful thanks are due to the gay and good-natured people of Andalusia who allowed us to join in their Fiestas and disturb their Siestas’. The natives, whether played by Iberian or by British actors (the cast includes both: Virgilio Teixiera, who was Portuguese, is the celebrity bullfighter), are hot-blooded and/or crooked and/or deeply thick. You should see Tommy’s face when an overenthusiastic Spanish man kisses him on the cheek! As for the food … the octopus the hero is served is meant to be as stomach-turning as the caterpillar with which he tries to avoid paying the restaurant bill (because his wallet’s been nicked). On the other hand, the bullfighting isn’t meant to be rebarbative. And it’s true the bullring climax, thanks to being chaotically staged and overlong, turns out to be less upsetting than it is tedious.
There’s a makeweight romance between Tommy and Amanda (Janet Munro), an English girl fed up of working as a dancer in a Spanish night club. The first evening they’re together, Amanda finds Tommy consistently infuriating. It’s never why she starts changing her mind. Janet Munro can act but knowing that she died so young (thirty-eight) makes it doubly saddening to watch her talents wasted in the role. Given how feeble the script is, the number of names on the writing credits is astonishing. They include Talbot Rothwell, the doyen of Carry On screenplays, and Carry On regulars in front of camera are the only performers to give pleasure. It’s amusing to hear Sid James attempting, unusually and not badly, English in a foreign accent, even if he is still a likable rogue. The reliably excellent Bernard Cribbins is droll as James’s sidekick. Kenneth Williams’s appearance as the British Vice-Consul is all too brief.
Students of the art of film titles will know better but the zany, brightly-coloured opening credits struck me as slightly ahead of their time – they seem very 1960s. In contrast, the opening location sequences featuring ‘the gay and good-natured people of Andalusia’ have the odd look of black-and-white images that have been colorised – perhaps from one of those travelogue shorts that used to be an hors d’oeuvre on cinema programmes. After watching Tommy the Toreador, I still really like ‘Little White Bull’ (even though if it does now seem a bit of a pinch from ‘The Ugly Duckling’ in Hans Christian Andersen). As a four-year-old, I was lucky enough to hear it without having to watch Tommy Steele interpret it. In the film, he has an infectious effect on the Spanish children who listen to the song. No soon is it over than a couple of these kiddies are overacting like mad.
14 September 2020
