Michael Carreras (1963)
According to a DVD review on the Amazon website, What a Crazy World happened because Joan Littlewood’s partner Gerry Raffles happened to see Joe Brown on television, performing what became the film’s title number. Raffles liked what he heard and commissioned Alan Klein, who wrote the song, to develop a full-scale musical for Theatre Workshop. The result was performed at Stratford East before morphing into Michael Carreras’s film, whose cast is a mixture of current pop names (Brown, Marty Wilde, Susan Maughan) and Theatre Workshop alumni (Harry H Corbett, Avis Bunnage, Fanny Carby et al). Joe Brown plays What a Crazy World’s young East Ender hero, Alf Hitchens, who wants to get into the music business. He hawks round Denmark Street in vain a song he’s written but does manage to get a dogsbody office job in London’s answer to Tin Pan Alley. His music publisher boss there laughingly refers to Alf as ‘our budding Lionel Bart’.
The early 1960s, thanks to Oliver! and Blitz!, were Bart’s West End heyday but the first show whose song score he wrote single-handed was Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be, which also began life at Theatre Workshop, in 1959. That musical comedy and What a Crazy World have fings in common. Bart’s piece (with book by Frank Norman), set in the 1950s, is peopled by Cockney spivs, Teds, tarts and dodgy policemen. Klein’s principals are younger; Alf’s girlfriend Marilyn (Susan Maughan) and his sister Doris (Grazina Frame) have respectable jobs; but the boys, at the start, are out of work and may be on a slippery slope. Alf’s best mate Herbie (Marty Wilde) looks set to emulate his many relatives who’ve done time – he sings about them in ‘Oh What a Family’. With three other lads (Alan Klein, along with Barry Bethel and David Nott), Herbie also performs What a Crazy World‘s opener, ‘A Layabout’s Lament’, in the local labour exchange. This echoes the jaunty, tongue-in-cheek, times-changing-for-the-worse thrust of Lionel Bart’s title song for Fings.
Sad to say, it also makes for a shocking start to the film. Carreras peoples the labour exchange with Africans, Arabs, Chinese and Indians, all in supposedly comical national dress – you can’t move in the place for turbans and burnouses. ‘A Layabout’s Lament’ reads as a gruesome variation on the traditional anti-immigrant lament: instead of ‘they come over here and take our jobs’, ‘they come over here and take our place in the dole queue’. Except for a few teenagers of colour on the margins of a later sequence in a British Legion dance hall, the labour exchange men are the only non-whites seen throughout – never mind that the opening titles sequence is a crowded street scene, in a Petticoat Lane-type market.
Present-day viewers will likely struggle to forgive or forget that first number – a pity because What a Crazy World is not only entertaining but an interesting piece of social history too, in more engaging ways. As well as scenes shot on location in Denmark Street and by Cleopatra’s Needle, Carreras (who co-wrote the screenplay with Klein) shows the youngsters in, for example, an amusement arcade, a coffee bar, a cinema and a bowling alley – the last perhaps a nod to the lyrics of ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be’ (‘They changed our local Palais into a bowling alley’). What’s more, Alf’s determination to get into professional songwriting must have played strongly to audiences of his generation as an especially appealing (and, by 1963, possible) escape route from dead-end jobs or no jobs at all.
What a Crazy World may be indebted too, more unexpectedly so, to another contemporary stage success. As in Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons (first produced in the West End in 1960), Klein’s musical has a Common Man figure (Michael Ripper). He keeps popping up in different guises – a street vendor, a labour exchange jobsworth, the amusement arcade manager, the coffee bar owner. Later on, he’s a spoilsport park-keeper and (out of character) an oldish bloke sitting behind Alf and Marilyn at the pictures, where he sentimentally earwigs on their romantic conversation. Played by Michael Ripper, the Common Man (he’s so named in the credits) is usually harassed – his mantra is ‘Bleedin’ kids’. The film, in contrast, is, almost needless to say, firmly on the side of the younger generation (Alan Klein was only in his early twenties). Alf’s parents, Sam (Harry H Corbett) and Mary (Avis Bunnage), spend their evenings as per the title song – ‘Dad’s gone down the dog track, mother’s playin’ bingo’. That’s the first line of the chorus. The third line – ‘No one seems to notice me, isn’t it a sin?’ – is, if anything, even more essential to the piece. Alf’s tone isn’t at all self-pitying. Even so, he wants to be noticed.
‘What a Crazy World (We’re Livin In)’ wasn’t a big hit when Joe Brown released it in 1962 (unlike his next single, ‘A Picture of You’) but this is the song Alf is trying to sell, and the film too depends on it. A brass band is playing the tune in the opening market scene. We see and hear Alf composing the number, strumming away on a banjo. It accompanies the closing credits, with different characters each singing a line. Oddly, though, what supposedly caught Gerry Raffles’s attention in the first place is never heard in its entirety, for all its superiority to the other songs. Klein dutifully put together the required musical elements – an I-want-to-be-someone solo (‘Please Give Me a Chance’), a lovers’ tiff duet (‘I Feel the Same Way Too’), and so on. Alf, Doris and their younger brother Joey (Michael Goodman) do ‘Bruvvers’, a lively, cheerful complaint about each other. The Hitchens parents envy their kids’ relatively easy life in ‘Things We Never Had’. All these are agreeable enough but the tunes are basic and the words no more than serviceable. It’s the combination of social context and engaging performances that brings What a Crazy World to life.
Except for Freddie and the Dreamers, who appear as themselves (or nearly themselves: they’re billed as ‘Frantic’ Freddie and the Dreamers) at the British Legion dance hall, the pop stars in the cast need to act as well as sing. Joe Brown, thoroughly natural and greatly likeable, is by far the most successful – he holds the film together with ease. Marty Wilde does well too; compared with Brown, he’s delivering more of a turn but very ably. Susan (‘Bobby’s Girl’) Maughan is wooden but her speaking voice is such an extraordinary concoction you’re almost glad it’s been recorded for posterity. Maughan’s own vowel sounds (Birmingham via County Durham) keep intruding on her awkward attempt at a London accent. More occasionally, she sounds mid-Atlantic or an English cut above her working-class East End character. Perhaps Maughan is making the point that Marilyn (it’s she who sings ‘Please Give Me a Chance’) has aspirations. Or perhaps that’s wishful thinking. For their part, the experienced actors have to sing a bit – or speak sing. Avis Bunnage does that very effectively in ‘Things We Never Had’, which cuts between Mary at bingo and Sam in the bar at the dog track. Harry H Corbett has dynamism to spare throughout – he verges on the overpowering. I liked Michael Goodman as Joey (according to IMDb, he hardly ever acted on screen again), the ever-reliable Fanny Carby as Mary’s friend and bingo companion, and Larry Dann, another Theatre Workshop regular, as one of Alf’s friends.
As a piece of film-making, What a Crazy World is sometimes remarkably primitive. The Denmark Street episode focuses so heavily on Alf getting chucked out of every place he tries that it’s a surprise when he turns out to have got the job with Solly Gold (Monte Landis). The camera soars miles above Alf and Marilyn during one of their duets; image and sound are on the point of fadeout when Michael Carreras suddenly cuts to a near-close-up of the couple and the volume goes back up. Near the end, a montage of newspaper headlines (‘Unknown writes number one hit’) seems to be revealed as a fantasy on Alf’s part: he returns to reality with his chronically disparaging father telling him his song’s no good. We never do get confirmation that Alf breaks into the big time. Herbie and co meanwhile simply disappear from the story. Carreras makes clear the show is over by having the main cast line up on the screen for a virtual curtain call – it seems a mark of desperation as much as an acknowledgement of the piece’s stage origins. So What a Crazy World starts off offensive and ends up a mess – but I’m very pleased to have seen it.
4 September 2020
