Tuesday 25 August 2015

'Windbag the Sailor' (1936) - The enduring comic genius of Will Hay, Moore Marriott and Graham Moffat.

If you'll forgive the pun, comedy is a funny thing.   It can be very personal, as much as matters of taste - what one person finds amusing, another may not.   It can work along cultural or national lines  - how often does the awkward phrase 'British sense of humour' rear its head as an explanation of Anglo-American misunderstanding? 

Screen comedians are no different.  I've written elsewhere about my love of Will Hay and I'm not ashamed to say that I count his films as among the funniest I've ever seen.  This is entirely subjective, of course, and I can't separate my appreciation of these films from my childhood memories of rainy school holidays and occasional sick days when BBC2's daytime schedule was full of Will Hay, James Robertson Justice, Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, The Three Stooges and Buster Crabbe serials.  
Will Hay

For these reasons I will concede that Hay's films are something of an acquired taste and might appear a little dated to the modern viewer but his influence on British comedy is undeniable I think.
  
After honing his act during a lengthy career in musical hall, Will Hay appeared in eighteen feature films between 1934 and 1943 for Gainsborough and Ealing studios, where he was mostly directed by Marcel Varnel. This extraordinary output saw him rival the biggest British cinema's biggest stars at that time, George Formby and Gracie Fields. Although they varied somewhat most of Hay's roles can be seen as variations on what the film critic Leslie Halliwell called 'the seedy incompetent' - a pompous fool who bluffs his way into a position of authority and is forced to live on his wits, or lack of... Alan Simpson, half of the Galton and Simpson partnership that wrote for Tony Hancock, describes him as "a con man on the verge of being found out, a ducker, a diver - always dodgy, always shifty'"and sees a direct influence on Arthur Lowe, Frankie Howerd and Hancock himself. You could add Basil Fawlty to that list too.

Hay's musical hall act revolved around a seedy schoolmaster and it was this persona he brought to the big screen in his first films, either at St Michael's or Narkover boarding school  - as in 'Boys Will Be Boys' (1935) and 'Good Morning Boys' (1937).

But Hay's best films were undoubtedly with Moore Marriott and Graham Moffat and together they formed one of British comedy's greatest screen teams. In their anarchic humour and brilliant interplay they were an English Marx brothers. 




1936's 'Windbag the Sailor' was their first film together and it set the tone for what was to come. Hay plays Benjamin Cutlet, a braggart who is paying for his drinks at a dockside inn by spinning yarns of his fictitious sea adventures.  Marriott (Harbottle) and Moffat (Albert) play employees at the inn and his unwitting accomplices as his bluff is called and he's forced to captain an unseaworthy ship and a mutinous crew who soon become wise to Hay's incompetence.

First Mate: Eight bells have gone sir.
Hay (shocked): Well, if it goes on like this we shan't have any left! 

The trio are shipwrecked with only a bakelite radio on an island populated by cannibals. The radio, or 'voice in box', proves awe-inspiring to the cannibals and saves the day as Hay assumes the role of Big Chief Radio Luxembourg and Marriott Big Chief Weather Forecast. You get the general idea, I'm sure. 



Hay was a gifted physical comedian with a huge range of facial expressions and an absolute master of the double-take (Graham Rinaldi claims there are over 200 in his films - crying out for a Youtube compilation video, I'd say). Yet it is the interplay between the three actors that raises their films to the sublime.  Marriot was a remarkable actor in his own right, earning himself the accolade 'British Cinema's master of disguise'. He specialised in appearing as characters much older than his actual age, mischievously winning Southend On Sea's oldest inhabitant competition in 1931, at the ripe old age of 46. 


Moore Marriott in 'Windbag the Sailor' 
Moffat tended to play the smart-alec, wise  to and often critical of Hay's schemes. It probably helped the on-screen dynamic that Hay and Moffatt apparently weren't the best of friends off screen.


Graham Moffatt


So, a comic trio comprising of a boastful shyster, a cynical, smart-alec youngster and a silly old duffer. Sound familiar?















Whether John Sullivan deliberately paid homage to Hay's team is not clear but the influence is there for all to see. I don't pretend that these comic archetypes originated with Hay; the 'old fool' character can be seen as far back as Homer's 'Iliad' and the character Nestor who serves no other purpose in the Trojan war than to offer advice and reminiscences to the younger Greek leaders, usually of the 'in my day...' variety.

While 'Windbag..' was the first time this trio appeared together it wasn't their most celebrated movie - that accolade would probably be granted to 'Oh Mr Porter!' (1937)  or arguably 'Ask A Policeman' (1939). The former was listed by film critics Barry Norman and Derek Malcolm in the top 100 films of the twentieth century. I tend to think of these movies as a pair as they are very similar.  In both our trio are in positions of pointless authority - railway porters at a station that has no passing trains in the former, policemen in a town without crime in the latter. 

In both, their easy life is complicated by seemingly supernatural agencies - a ghost train in the former, a 'eadless 'orseman in the latter. It won't be too much of a spoiler to say that both films have a Scooby Doo-like resolution.


If pushed I would probably pick 'Ask A Policeman' as my favourite, if only for the brilliant scene where Marriott simultaneously plays Harbottle and Harbottle's father (with an even longer beard and an even more high-pitched voice very reminiscent of Terry Jones' character in 'Life of Brian' ).



The team made three more films together, 'Old Bones of the River' (1938), 'Convict 99' (1939) and 'Where's That Fire' (1940). Hay continued to make films after the dissolution of the partnership, with Claude Hulbert and a young Charles Hawtrey as his new stooges but it is the seedy schoolmaster and, in particular, the films with Marriot and Moffat retain a special place in my memory and the annals of British comedy.  

Will Hay died on April 18th 1949, aged 60 - perhaps fittingly, the retirement age of a schoolmaster.

References/further reading - Graham Rinaldi's comprehensive biography 'Will Hay', Tomahawk Press, 2009.
  



Sunday 5 July 2015

Alternative Oscars - 'The Third Man' (1949)

Seeing one of your favourite movies of all-time re-released on the big screen is among the rarest of pleasures and so it proved when I was lucky enough to see a 4k restoration of Carol Reed and Graham Greene's 'The Third Man' recently. 

                           



My giving writer and director equal credit is deliberate: this was very much a collaboration, and the brilliance of the film is as much due to the wonderful characters and eminently quotable dialogue as the haunting visuals. Greene was asked to write a film for Carol Reed but, as he explained in the preface to the book, found it "impossible to write a film play without first writing a story." Having said that there are many differences between the two and Greene concedes the film is better than the story, partly because it is "the finished state of the story ."
                 
Graham Green (left) and Carol Reed
I would go as far as to say 'The Third Man' may be the greatest British movie ever made. Fans of 'Brief Encounter' might have a strong case for an argument, as would proponents of Powell & Pressburger's finest moments or perhaps the best output of Ealing Studios. But not much else compares.

This bold claim got me thinking about the criteria that determines the "nationality" of a film. The location of the production company is probably the boring answer. John Kobal's 'Top 100 movies' remains an essential reference book for me, but I remember being confused that the highest ranked British film therein (# 18) was Kubrick's '2001 A Space Odyssey.' An MGM film, directed by a Jewish American starring two American actors ?! Despite its English director and writer, 'The Third Man' features two Hollywood stars (Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten), an Italian lead actress (Alida Valli) and is a film loosely about post-war Vienna's division into British, American, Russian and French zones. In many ways then, an international film. 

Of course, there's much more to 'The Third Man' than that mere summary of its historical setting. It's that rare instance where every aspect of the film is in perfect synchronicity - the casting, the performances, the writing, the visuals and, of course, Anton Karas' remarkable musical score. 

Without giving too much away, the story essentially concerns a novelist, Holly Martens, arriving in Vienna to meet an old friend, Harry Lime, only to find that Lime died a few days earlier in a traffic accident. Martens suspects foul play and begins his own investigations, aided by Lime's girlfriend, Anna Schmidt, much to the consternation of the British Army Police (memorable turns from Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee). 

Visually it is a stunning movie, recalling German Expressionism and Welles' own 'Citizen Kane' in the camera's unusual angles. Vienna itself is perfectly utilised - its dark cobbled streets, its sewers and a run-down amusement park. Filmed in black and white, and shot at night but with strong lighting, it is full of contrasts. Moreover, the visual contrast of light and dark mirrors the moral ambivalence of the character at the heart of the film, Harry Lime.



It may well be Welles' best acting performance. Brief, but full of moments of brilliance; Lime is a shadowy figure, smirking and winking at the camera before disappearing - a metaphor for Welles' own career as a film-maker perhaps?


                                  



It is a film that contains some of my favorite moments in movie history.  Such as, Lime's self-justifying speech, famously improvised by Welles: "It's not so bad. You know what the fellow said, in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, murder and bloodshed but produced Michelangelo, Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years they had democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly." And of course,  the ferris wheel scene...

                                  





Greene and Reed disagreed over the ending of the movie. The writer was of the view that "an entertainment of this kind was too light an affair to carry the weight of an unhappy ending", before conceding that Reed was "triumphantly right" in his downbeat finale.  The final scene, Anna's almost interminable approach towards Martens, is glorious and brave beyond measure.  It is intended to recall the opening of the movie but I was reminded also of Lean's 'Lawrence of Arabia', specifically the introduction of  the recently deceased Omar Sharif's Sherif Ali - another film that justifiably could lay claim to be Britain's best, and another movie star taken too soon.