Gilbert Gunn (1961)
‘Please be advised that the following film features attitudes and language from a previous era which today may offend some viewers’, announces the jolly Talking Pictures TV voiceover, itself designed to evoke, more nostalgically, a bygone Britain. The farcical comedy What a Whopper vindicates the warning in double quick time. The very first shot is of a female backside, bouncing along a London street and thoroughly objectified: the bottom’s owner’s face is hardly visible. To make matters worse, the image is accompanied by the daft title song.
I’d better explain why I was watching What a Whopper and that the title, double entrendre-ish as it is, refers chiefly to the Loch Ness monster, and the Nessie-related lie that drives the meagre plot. I’m interested in British pop music as well as cinema of my childhood years – the late 1950s and early 1960s – and in the vogue then for films designed, to a greater or lesser extent, as vehicles for currently all-the-rage pop stars. (I’ve recorded four of these from television recently. Notes on What a Crazy World (1963), Tommy the Toreador (1959) and Expresso Bongo (also 1959) will follow.) The driver of this particular vehicle was twenty-one-year-old Adam Faith, who’d had consecutive number one hit singles with ‘What Do You Want?’ and ‘Poor Me’, in late 1959 and early 1960 respectively.
Faith plays Tony Blake, a London lad with an eye to the main chance. Publishers keep rejecting Tony’s book about the Loch Ness monster. He reckons this is because they don’t believe in the creature so he decides to fake evidence of its existence. Thanks to his friend Vernon (Terence Longdon), an electronic music enthusiast, Tony gets some monstrous sounds to accompany photographs of the crummy Nessie model that they take, appropriately enough, in the Serpentine. Along with Vernon’s girlfriend Charlotte (Carole Lesley), known as Charlie, the pair then set out for Loch Ness, to drum up local excitement and, Tony hopes, consequent interest in his manuscript. On the road to Scotland, they pick up a French hitchhiker, Marie (Marie France), and let her in on the ruse.
Once the action has moved north, the Nessie story gives way, for a while, to a subplot about salmon poaching. Harry Sutton (Sid James), landlord of the Loch Ness hostelry where the rest of the film is set, and his partner, Jimmy (Ewan Roberts), have a load of fish to conceal from the police and keep moving it from one car boot to another. One of the cars is the repurposed funeral hearse Tony acquires for his Scottish adventure. The other is also a big black number, belonging to Charlie’s inebriated father (Freddie Frinton). He’s followed his daughter from London on the instructions of his domineering wife (Fabia Drake), who’s convinced Charlie is heading for Gretna Green and marriage to the unsuitable Vernon. Local law enforcement is represented by the predictably inept pairing of a bossy sergeant (Terry Scott) and his anxious, put upon underling (Gordon Rollings). In other words, What a Whopper features plenty of well-known comedy performers; they also include Wilfrid Brambell and, back in London, Charles Hawtrey, Clive Dunn and Spike Milligan (as a tramp watching the Serpentine photo shoot). Whether the ill-gotten salmon take centre stage to accommodate these comic talents or because the main idea is so thin is a nice question. The answer is probably both.
Familiarity was evidently important to the enterprise: several of the cast are doing their usual thing. Freddie Frinton was famous for his drunks. Clive Dunn may be playing a petty bureaucrat serving an eviction notice on Tony for non-payment of his bedsit rent but Dunn is also doing his elderly dodderer act, years before Dad’s Army. There’s another foreshadowing of the latter: when Wilfrid Brambell tells the gathering in Sid James’s bar the terrifying story of his encounter with the Loch Ness ‘beastie’, he anticipates the doom-laden tales of John Laurie’s Private Frazer. The presence of James, Charles Hawtrey and Terry Scott, on the other hand, naturally calls to mind the Carry On films. So does the rampant political incorrectness.
Carole Lesley, genuinely vivid in her dumb blonde role, first appears semi-nude as Charlie prepares to pose for an artist. On arrival at the Scottish inn, where Marie alone books a room and the other three climb a ladder and negotiate a sloping roof to join her there, Charlie ‘accidentally’ loses her top making the ascent. Marie has to think on her feet when, late that evening, Jimmy knocks on her door: as Tony, Charlie and Vernon take cover, Marie tells Jimmy to wait a moment – she’s getting ready for bed. When he enters the room, she’s in her bra and pants, holding a coverlet over her but standing with her back to a mirror … Jimmy’s exit line is ‘I’m very pleased to have seen you, Miss’.
If What a Whopper is more egregiously sexist than racist it may be only because the ogling occupies more screen time. There’s a single actor of colour, Lloyd Reckord, in a very minor role. More surprising – startling – is the name of the used car dealer from whom Tony acquires the hearse. The sign outside the premises reads, in big letters, ‘S LEGREE (The Honest Dealer)’. It’s true that, thanks to my other main interest, I initially misread the first bit as ST LEGER but the mistake served to increase the impact of then realising the dealer shared his initial and surname (hardly a common one) with the murderous slave owner in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Gilbert Gunn was a Glaswegian but the film is arguably racist too even in its depiction of Scots.
Lloyd Reckord’s character is Jojo, one of the variously bohemian tenants of the London house. I couldn’t work out whether Jojo was meant to be the Charles Hawtrey character’s boyfriend but he’s certainly his friend so you’re bound to wonder – Hawtrey and girlfriends seldom went together. Here he plays, believe it or not, a Jackson Pollock-type ‘splatter’ artist. Maybe someone somewhere has done a thesis on the satirical subtext of What a Whopper as an expose of contemporary creative pretensions – and commercial opportunism around the Loch Ness monster. The locals are ecstatic when Tony and his bogus evidence first appear on the scene. Harry, especially, is delighted with the increased bar takings.
Although he died young (sixty-two), Adam Faith enjoyed greater longevity as a screen actor than other pop star film leads of the era. You can see why: if he sometimes seems a bit underpowered in What a Whopper it’s because his playing is relatively naturalistic in a company dominated by full-on performers. I’d not realised before quite how short Faith was (5’ 5”) but that helps give Tony a hint of vulnerability that enriches his chancer persona. The rules of the sub-genre require that Faith sings a bit – two numbers by Johnny Worth. ‘What a Whopper’ (which pinches bits of the tune of ‘Oh Dear! What Can the Matter Be?’) is garbage, ‘The Time Has Come’ more noteworthy. A pretty, self-reproachful plaint (‘The time has come for me to hang my head in shame/The time has come for me to say that I’m to blame …’), it’s playing on Marie’s transistor radio, supposedly sung by Eden Charity. Tony, vexed by the success of this latest hit-maker, complains he could do better himself. Faith, charmingly, competes with his own voice. What a Whopper opened in British cinemas on 17 October 1961. By the beginning of November, ‘The Time Has Come’ had entered the charts, where it eventually reached number four.
The set-up also appears to dictate that the star of the show, is, despite the (very) broad humour of the piece, exempted from looking too silly. Tony briefly shares a bed with a Caledonian maniac (Archie Duncan). Near the end, pursued by other locals who’ve got wise to his deception, he disguises himself as a kilted, false-bearded bagpiper. Faith nevertheless keeps his dignity to an extent denied his co-stars. The two girls aren’t the only ones to shed their clothes. As he replaces his trousers after losing them for the nth time in the picture, Terence Longdon’s Vernon ruefully remarks that ‘It’s hardly worth putting them back on’. Since What a Whopper is primitive and mostly inept, it’s damning with faint praise to say that Adam Faith is the best thing in it but he is. To that extent, the people behind the film achieved what they set out to achieve.
I laughed once, when Terry Scott, suspicious of the goings on at the lochside inn, says, ‘We’ll put this lot under surveillance’, and Gordon Rollings replies, ‘I’ve got a better idea: let’s keep watch on them’. And I kept smiling when Fabia Drake, informed that her daughter has gone off in a hearse, draws the logical conclusion and threatens to faint, with Charles Hawtrey ill-equipped to support her considerable weight. (Not for the first or last time, Drake was playing a battleaxe. She was a seriously good actress, though, as her late, great performance in The Jewel in the Crown proved.) Gilbert Gunn directed only one more cinema film after What a Whopper (he died in 1967) but there’s no denying the writers went on to better – or, at least, better remembered – things. The script was devised by Jeremy Lloyd (Are You Being Served?, ’Allo ’Allo!) and Trevor Peacock (Jim in The Vicar of Dibley and lots more: he has a cameo here as a barrow boy). It was then reworked by Terry Nation, who would soon graduate to Doctor Who. By far the most illustrious cinema career ahead would be John Barry’s. He’d already done a lot to bring about Adam Faith’s pop success and he arranged his numbers in What a Whopper. That’s probably why the title song is, maddeningly, an earworm – as I’ve discovered in recent days.
2 September 2020
