The British Film: Comedy and Cavalcanti: Program 3
THE BLACK SHEEP OF WHITEHALL (Ealing Studios, 1942) Directed by Basil Dearden and Will Hay; original story and screenplay by Angus Macphail and John Dighton; produced by Michael Balaton; camera: Gunther Krampf and Eric Cross; art director, Tom Morahan; 8 reels
Starring Will Hay, with John Mills, Basil Sydney, Frank Cellier, Felix Aylmer, Henry Hewitt, Joss Ambler, Frank Allenby, Thora Hird, Margaret Halston, Leslie Mitchell, Barbara Valerie, Kenneth Griffith, Marjorie Rhodes, Ronald Shiner.
Over the past two weeks we have been fortunate in being able to show Jack Hulbert and George Formby films that were both among their best and most typical, With Will Hay, perhaps the least known of the trio over here (though in England by far the most popular) we aren't so lucky. The Black Sheep of Whitehall was one of his last films -- there were only two more, and decidedly lesser ones, ahead of him before his death. It is a good comedy, and the Hay screen character runs pretty much along the established lines, so it's a reliable introduction to Hay himself, but it hardly indicates his full potential. It's rather like being introduced to the Nam Brothers via A Night in Casablanca instead of Duck Soup. Ho-ever, later in the year we will have access to one of Hay's top features, Oh Mr. Porter, and in the meantime this is a far from shabby introduction to his work.
Will Hay, a former music hall comio,had a wider range than either Hulbert or Formby. His screen character was more complex, and more unique, and as co- director of most of his films, he had more to do with the shaping of his own comedy. Too, he could be a good straight actor, though he did but little of it, and in later years the occasional straight role -- as in the wartime propaganda film The Big Blockade -- was usually tinged with a little humour so as not to disappoint audiences. Hie first movie was a comedy, but a wry, subtle one, devoid of slapstick; titled Those Were The Days, it was a charming evocation of music hall days and Victorian morality, and was based on Pinero's play The Magistrate. Coincidentally, John Mills appeared with him in that one too.
Hay's basic screen character was somewhat similar to W.C. Fields'; he was lazy, shiftless, often talentless, a chiseller and not above taking a drink -- especially if someone else would pay for it, He was frequently finding himself-dam In positions of trust and responsibility where he was totally inadequate -- and yet somehow bluffing his way through to ultimate success. His most familiar screen character was as the know-nothing schoolmaster, plagued by a group of teen-aged monsters much smarter than he, His best films, in the 30's, were not only unique for this basically unsympathetic character, but for their often inspired plots and slapstick. There seems to be a certain overlapping here from the work of Keaton. Windbag the Sailor, directed by American William Beaudine, has basically the same plot as The Navigator, and Oh Mr. Porter, probably his best, neatly combines "The General" and 'The Ghost Train". Much of the Hay comedy reflected typical British nostalgia for things old -- his "co-stars'
included an old fire engine, horse-drawn of course, and an old locomotive. Locations took in abandoned railway stations, small rural constabularies (one bearing the delightful and not un-English name of Turnbotham Round) and out-of-date British schools, and the plots found him involved in such typically British activities as rum smuggling and schemes to blow up the House of Lords. Like Fields and the Marx Brothers, he surrounded himself with familiar and oft-used "types". Martita Hunt was, in the thirties, a British Margaret Dumont, and as Lady Bagahot was a perfect foil for Hay. Peter Gawthorne was her stuffy wale equivalent. And Hay had two cohorts with him In his best pictures, making up one of the funniest trios in British comedies. Graham Moffat was a rotund teen-ager, and Moore Marriott (actually a dignified middle-aged character actor) appeared with fartastic makeup as a toothless, bearded old relic, forever offering "helpful" suggestions which of course went wrong. The best films of this trio were "Oh Mr. Porter", "Good Morning Boys", "Windbag the Sailor", though "Convict 99" and "Old Bones of the River" had their moments too. Another top one was "Ask a Policeman" (although it had some very "blue" lines, unusual for Hay); it was followed by Where's That Fire? which marked the end of the Hay-Moffat-Marriot films. All of these had been made for Gainsborough; Hay then shifted, as a solo comedian, to Saline, where his first film was "The Ghost of St. Michaels". Though without his team-mates, he was on familiar ground as an inept schoolmaster, and had comedy-thrill material that was very much of an extension of Oh Mr. Porter.
With "The Black Sheep of Whitehall'', there seems to have been an effort made to create a new Hay "image" -- to retain his essential character, but to lessen the slapstick content, and to put Hay into an increased number of "situations" that play well on their own, and are really quite divorced from the main story-line.
For those with the eyes and ears to notice, and they're all the more effective for being handled unobtrusively. "Doorway to Hell", "Me Gangster" and other early crime films had these elements too, all held well in check; it was the much later gangster films, starting with "Blind Alley" and ranging through "Angels With Dirty Faces" and up through "White Heat", that went overboard on the psychological angles and thereby ruined the genre, just as "High Noon" did more harm than good for the cause of the Western.
What, "Scarface" has that few of the early gangster films had is pace. Later, more conventional films like "G Man" had that pace, but the early ones - from Cruze's City Gone Wild and Sternberg's Underworld through to "The Public Enemy", "Little Caesar" and Bad Company - were generally, regardless of other merits, ' just too deliberately and slowly constructed. "Scarface", despite the usual slowness inherent In early 30's dramatic scenes, played without Incidental music or dynamic editing, crackles from the word go. If its savagery is overdone, then at least the mood it seeks to create Is not; better a gangland that is too much a combination of jungle and battleground than the gangland of Little Caesar which is all tough posing and little else.
The action scenes in Scarface are flawlessly, blisteringly done; the killings, the machine-gun wars, the car chases, wrecks and bombings. Much of the film is now cliche of course: the No.1 Hoode with his squad of dress-suited body-guards, the terrorising of saloon-keepers into buying beer from the new mob; most of 'the characters, most of the situations, and almost all of the dialogue. Yet it is to the credit of "Scarface" that here at least it still seems fresh and powerful. Thanks to C. Henry Gordon and Edwin Maxwell© the cops seem more three-dimensional than usual. (And yet Gordon and Maxwell usually played hoods themselves!) Karen Morley is still one of the most provocative of a long line of silken mistresses that ranged from Jean Harlow and Joan Blondell to Evelyn Brent, Mae Clarke and Louise Brooks. And the story itself, being patterned on the career of Capone, and encompassing such incidents as the St. Valentine's
Day Massacre, tends to hold up rather better than most of the Cagney/Robinson films from Warners.
Muni's exhibitionistic acting style is singularly suited to the Carmonte/Capone role, and he has seldom been better. Boris Karloff on the other hand, with that English voice and barely disguised cultured tones, just doesn't convince as a rival hood; somehow, one just can't believe that he gives a jot about who runs the North Side! However, Karloff's death scene is one of the most Impressive and Imaginatively visual moments in the picture; one can't help wondering whether the credit for this should go to writer Hecht or director Hawks -- or even perhaps to producer Hughes, who has contributed moments of real power and originality to pictures that were otherwise thoroughly mediocre. Altogether, Scarface continues to make a pronounced visual impact, and a very Germanic one at that, as the stylish opening scenes, and the Fritz Lang-like sequence of the reporter interviewing Karloff in his dingy hideaway, show quite clearly.
Very much but. and reshaped since its original release (one reissue version even faked up a sequence of Muni being tried and hung), this print, we're happy to say, is quite complete and in reasonably good shape, It's a dupe, but a pretty good one, and the harsh quality of the print seems to jell rather well with the seedy nature of the story and settings. However, a redone British foreword rather betrays the Anglo-Saxon lack of familiarity with American gangsterism by listing the prohibition years as being from 1919 to 1924!
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NEXT FRIDAY -- FILM GROUP meeting --
NEXT SUNDAY's 35mm SHOW AT THE NEW YORKER (NO TITLES HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED AS YET). WILL NOT TAKE PLACE AS I'LL BE OUT OF TOWN AGAIN BRIEFLY.
NEXT TUESDAY -- Rin Tin Tin in CLASH OF THE WOLVES (1925); Chaplin in PAY DAY (1922)e and the "Silents Please" 3-r1 version of "OLD SAN FRANCISCO" (1927)
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