criminilarity

After loving Make Mine Mink for my entire adult life and more, I decided I'd watch some more ensemble films about funny criminals starring Terry-Thomas and scripted by Michael Pertwee. The Naked Truth (1957) is about a bunch of frankly awful people with terrible-ish past secrets who are being blackmailed by a tabloid journalist of sorts (more of a blackmailer, basically) who conspire to kill him with hilarious consequences. The black comedy aspects of The Naked Truth are upfront; it begins with some real suicides off-screen then our protagonists try to top themselves but fail amusingly. It's such a tangled farce it doesn't even really seem to have any 'acts' (not that I'm very scientific about these things) but just sprawls all over the place till suddenly it's done. But nicely done with Peter Sellers, Joan Sims, Peggy Mount, Shirley Eaton, Dennis Price and as mentioned T-T. I don't want to spoil the ending for you in case you ever see it but one of the oddest things about it is that the first twenty minutes provides frequent opportunities for a fabulous final line (the 'I'll see myself out' bit) which would have been so perfect in the final scene to the degree that I thought 'this is a ridiculously obvious set up' and... obviously no-one else thought so (or they just forgot). 

Too Many Crooks gives us George Cole, Sid James (as 'Sid' - yay!'), Joe Melia and Bernard Breslaw as the crooks and T-T as the rich man whose wife they accidentally kidnap. Full of famous comedic actors on the rise and, I suppose, decline. 

I often think we are spoiled in the 21st century where narratives are generally 'tied off' better and characterisation seems more full (though as per the gas on Venus, maybe you had to be there) and perhaps people in the late 1950s could hold onto a number of tropes that just made things make sense in the way they don't make sense 60 years later. In Too Many Crooks in particular we have the odd character of the wife Lucy who Terry-Thomas' character tells us early in the piece was rough and tough in the war but has since become meek and mild, for no reason except apparently (and illogically) she loves him. Once she realises he has left her to her fate with the blackmailers as he wanders around with one or a few blonde women (I actually couldn't tell if it was one or a few but maybe we weren't meant to care) she becomes a furious and calculating criminal herself and extorts most of T-T's money out of him. Sorry to spoil but what I really don't understand is why she then apparently reconciles with him at the end. It might be that it doesn't matter and it's just a funny film. Which it is.

Bernard Bresslaw actually gets the best lines in this movie - much better than Sid James or Joe Melia, who are both wasted here, and George Cole, who ineffectually plays someone ineffectual and is hard to care about either way. T-T (as Billy Gordon) is definitely the star and it's a joy seeing him being taken down more pegs than you thought imaginable. Brenda de Banzie as Lucy Gordon really relishes her bizarre two personalities (three, I suppose, counting the last scene).  

Old British films are depressing about humanity in ways it's hard to override but once you click into gear with the excellent character acting they often work. Both of these movies are presently on youtube (The Naked Truth in a compellingly out-of-sync version) and I recommend. Would like to know more about Mario Zampi, who directed both and was dead at the age of 60 within four years of making the second one. 

I went looking on AbeBooks to see if some bright spark had written a fabulous book about Mario Zampi I could order now to receive in May next year or something, but all I found was this, which would be fun to own but expensive at something like $150. 

(Later observation - the people who did these posters were remarkable. All these free components that could or were reassembled. If you have the crooks pointing their pistols in weird diverse directions it doesn't matter where Terry-Thomas or random blonde chick are running.)

what happens to humour

Because I have a plan (semi-flagged a few months ago on this blog) to write a journal article about Make Mine Mink, I bought a few cheap books online some time ago to help with a bit of colour. One arrived today - so long after I ordered it that, in fact, I had assumed that I had forgotten to buy it - Terry-Thomas' 1990 memoir, Terry-Thomas Tells Tales. It was published posthumously, in the year that he died, with an afterword by his co-author explaining that, although they had essentially completed the book in 1984, T-T got a bit obsessive about it and insisted he was going to pepper it with more amusing elements, but Parkinson's got the better of him. He kept the manuscript by his side for years, apparently, long after he lost the ability to speak, but could do nothing with it beyond a few amendments to the first third.

I am not going to go on and on about it or even attempt to pull together anything like a reflective overview of the book, mainly because it's so flippin' depressing. Every single joke, every anecdote and funny story, even every observation intended to amuse, doesn't just fall flat; it's from a universe that looks incredibly familiar, in fact a world I engage with in some way or another every day (via ideas from the 30s-70s, as absorbed-projected in films, tv, books, music etc) but in which the humour is just completely bleached out of the picture. T-T's world of entertaining ideas and concepts are not even banal, they're just like flavourless food. It's almost impressive for its ghastly shallowness, but it's also horrendous.   

What happens to humour? On facebook yesterday someone linked to a Stewart Lee clip, with a comment about whether they weren't sure if he was joking or not. I watched the whole ten minute clip (the 'playing the room as it's dealt' schtick) although I've seen it numerous times already, and marvelled at it. It's an extended riff on the audience's complicity in the comic's misery, and it's exceptionally clever. Terry-Thomas would presumably have barely understood it as comedy, I suppose (though it does mention Tony Hancock and T-T also talks about Hancock's, and other comedians', depressive phases). It made me think that, if and when Stewart Lee comes to Australia again (I've never seen him live) I think I might just go to as many shows as I can, perhaps even across a few cities, I'm that impressed by him. 

The T-T book on the other hand is the saddest thing, and not in a good way. Which is a shame because when he's good in a film, he's very good, although he's also (as he makes clear, unabashed about following the biggest-paying roles in any film, not out to make art) a hack, but I can admire a lot in hackdom. 

By the way one of the most interesting things in this pretty awful tome comes right at the beginning when T-T comes closest to self-awareness/analysis; he says that his parents had four boys, trying for a girl. He was the second-youngest (so presumably a disappointment) and when his sister came along he was no longer even the baby; so he played up for laughs, the only way he knew to retain his family's interest. That and the gap in his teeth, which was a quirk that presumably if nothing else made him self-conscious in good and perhaps bad ways. He says his sister had the same, incidentally. 

possibly the worst british film ever

Bruce Beresford's Side by Side is a 1975 comedy about two clubs, the Golden Nugget and Sound City. The first is owned by Max Nugget (Terry Thomas) who is both contemptuous of and dependent on his nephew Rodney (Barry Humphries), and the second by Gary (Billy Boyle). When it is discovered that the borough of Sludgley can only have one 'clubbe', the magistrate gives Inspector Crumb (Frank Thornton) the job of deciding which of the two clubs will have to close.

Naturally Gary gets on his motorbike and rides to London to find some new rock acts to book for the club. And equally naturally Max calls his niece Julia who works in a booking agency called Three Rs (rock 'n' roll representation). She is also apparently making an album at Abacus studio in her lunch break. Gary turns up at Three Rs as well and by grim coincidence becomes friendly with Julia, to the extent that before the end of the day he's telling her he loves to kiss girls' necks. He also tells her he can get a comedian to play at her uncle's club, though at this point he doesn't know that her uncle is his sworn arch-enemy Max Nugget. She plays him a video of Fox performing their second* single 'Imagine Me Imagine You', and by the time it's over they have apparently gone off to root. The next morning, they try to eat food at Biba's but when Gary discovers that Julia's Max Nugget's niece he throws a cream pie at famous comedian Joe Baker and runs out of the shop, just runs out.

Meanwhile no-one really knows what to do at the Golden Nugget but there is a woman called Violet, who just hangs around with no real purpose except to lavish attention on Rodney, who she adores passionately but who can't bear to be touched. She keeps trying to ravish him.

The film is full of people putting paste on posters, from enormous glue pots, which they then only seem to stick out the front of their respective venues. Sound City is full of kids, presumably bored young foxy kids, who help out. Julia has booked all the hot young bands for the best show ever, and these bands are Hello (who we have already seen performing 'Bend me shape me' and who Wikipedia informs us had a drummer, Jeff Allen, who was actually born Jeffrey Allen) and Desmond Dekker (he sings 'Israelites'. I notice that in Peter Coleman's book about Bruce Beresford's career he says that some of the songs in the film were hits. He doesn't actually say that they were hits because they were in the film, but I reckon there's an implication of that. 'Israelites' was a hit in 1968).

Then the two clubs put on the shows, and there is a riot for no apparent reason but it does involve cream pies, including one in the face of Joe Baker, who I forgot to tell you is performing at the Golden Nugget, and who does a very, very short act about pneumatic drills. In the conflagration the walls are smashed in and so there is now one club, Julia and Gary get back together and someone sings a song. Violet does a striptease as Madame Lash and whips Rodney, curing him both of his hayfever and his asexuality. At almost the end there is a caption on the screen to say:

'The clubs were renamed GOLDEN CITY and are now the centre of Sludgely's cultural life'.

Jokes:

Rodney: 'Who else do you know who isn't dead or Australian?'
Max: 'What's the difference?'

Rodney: 'I think I will have that massage after all, Violet, I do feel a little stiffness.'

One of the places named amongst the locations is 'Sludgely'

Max Nugget reels off a short list of all the 'greats' he knew in his day, including 'Terry-Thomas'.

I wanted to see this film because:

(1) everyone who has seen it derides it. Coleman says Beresford did it for money and because, after the Barry McKenzie films, it was hard for him to get work.

(2) I thought it would have some good things about gentrification, performance spaces etc

(3) I thought Noosha Fox had a role in it

Now I can say with confidence to (1), it's justifiably derided (2) nah (3) nuh-uh.

* Possibly third