Hancock’s Hour and a Half: a review of The Rebel

Released in US as Call Me Genius

Directed by Robert Day

Written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson

Tony Hancock

Produced by W.A. Whittaker

Starring

Tony Hancock as Anthony Hancock

George Sanders as Sir Charles Broward

Paul Massie as Paul

Margit Saad as Margot

Grégoire Aslan as Carreras

Dennis Price as Jim Smith

Irene Handl as Mrs. Crevatte

John Le Mesurier as office manager

Liz Fraser as waitress

Mervyn Johns as manager of art gallery

Peter Bull as manager of art gallery

Nanette Newman as Josey

Marie Burke as Madame Laurent

Oliver Reed as Artist in cafe

Mario Fabrizi as coffee Bar attendant

Bernard Rebel as art dealer

John Wood as poet

Victor Platt as dockside official

Neville Becker as artist

Cinematography Gilbert Taylor

Edited by Richard Best

Music by Frank Cordell

Production company

Associated British Picture Corporation

Distributed by Warner-Pathé Distributors

Release date 2 March 1961

Running time 105 minutes

Country United Kingdom Language English

The Guardian had an article the other day, asking various staff writers what their favorite “feel-good” movie was. There was the usual collection of rom-coms and inspirational (or at least aspirational) flicks, ranging from memorable to rubbish. Further along the list, I found a treasure: a movie I had never heard of, starring Tony Hancock. The reviewer said it was “Anthony Hancock in full colour” and “at the height of his comedic powers.”

Hancock and I go back a ways. Saturday afternoons at 3pm, Hancock’s Half Hour would come on the BBC. I was eight or nine, and this was the first “grown-up” show that I took an interest in. It didn’t have clowns, puppets or magic spinach. It was adults doing adult things, something I usually found immensely boring, but this lot—Hancock, Hattie Jacques, Sid Kerr and Kenneth Williams—were incredibly funny, with sharp, acrid repartee and lunatic situations.

We moved back to Canada in 1960, where football made no sense at all but at least the other kids stopped calling me an American—not a flattering epithet in 1950s London. Hancock receded into the mists of childhood memory.

In 1968 I learned that Hancock had died, which was a shocking death in a year of shocking deaths. I remembered the show, with the trombone and the stuttered “Haaaah-ncock’s haaalf hour” and remember I liked it—and him.

Along about 1987 my Mom passed along a whole selection of record albums that she had accumulated from my dad and various aunts. Most were Chopin, Mozart, various romantic composers. Then I spotted three of my dad’s that were soundtracks from Hancock’s Half Hour. My wife, who is British, was born five years after me and had never heard of Tony Hancock. That’s a bit like an American who had never heard of Bob Hope. So I played them, both for her and myself.

Now, quite often when you visit something you thought was abfab when you were eight years old, you’re going to be disappointed. I once made the mistake of downloading a couple of Tom Swift books, bibles in my misspent youth. I was absolutely appalled, fifty years later, not only by the vicious racism in the books, but the absolutely abject quality of the writing. They were utterly horrible.

Not so those old recordings! Yes, they were sitcoms from an era before anyone knew what a sitcom was, but they were extraordinarily witty, often erudite, and tinged with an element of existential despair that added considerable depth to the dialogue and made the humor more pointed—items I didn’t see as a child, but explained why my parents loved the show so much.

Hancock’s rants reminded me a lot of (and may well have been the basis for) Monty Python’s “The Travel Agent” rant. [See below].

Hancock, along with the Goon Show, may well have been the inspiration for the Pythons, but Hancock also greatly resembles another great English comedian who rose to fame a few years later: Peter Sellers. Their styles were entirely different: Sellers had hundreds of different personas, often several in the same film, whereas Hancock always played a fictionalized version of himself. Both could be silly and profound in the same breath, and had the same darkness hovering behind the wit.

In real life, both were considered absolute horrors to work with, brusque, domineering, bullying, perfectionist and erratic. Both suffered from severe depression and died young. (I learned many years after his death that Hancock died by suicide.) My comparison to Sellers has a purpose, because it fits in my review of The Rebel.

Speaking of which, let’s get to it. Hancock is a middle-class clark (clerk in America). This is at the very end of post-war London, and the city, unawares, is about to be convulsed by a vast societal upheaval, Antony Burgess and Mary Quant and Mick Jagger and London swing like a pendulum do.

But this is right at the beginning, when change is about to stir, and in this time, the clarks all wear black suits with narrow lapels and skinny dark ties, and black bowlers and carry black umbrellas. The only color to be seen is grimy boiled-liver grey.

The movie sets Hancock’s role deftly in the opening sequence. He is standing, clad in his workaday apparel at a chilly damp railway station with a single track. He is alone. On the far side of the track on the facing platform are several hundred other clarks, all dressed identically to Hancock. A passenger train pulls in. It’s the old sort, where each carriage is divided into compartments with facing leather-bound benches that seat six to eight adults, and each has a door on each side to allow egress. The train pulls to a stop, and Hancock nimbly opens a door and hops in and settles while on the other side hundred jostle and mill striving to get a preferred seat. This establishes immediately that Hancock, despite appearances, is of a different mindset entirely.

He works in an accounting firm, and the scene starts with a beautifully choreographed sequence where in perfect unison, the clarks all run fingers across bound ledgers, frown, enter digits in an old-fashioned adding machine, and pull the lever to enter the data as one. Except Hancock isn’t perusing numbers—instead, he’s drawing caricatures—bad ones—of his co-workers and his boss. The boss, already irritated because Hancock has hung his umbrella facing the wrong way from all the other ones, notices. Hancock rants, and gets sent home.

His first storey flat is filled with oil paintings. They are all awful, and look like they had been done by an eight year old with development issues. Tony, it seems, is an artiste. In his bedroom stands a seven-foot tall statue he’s working on, titled “Aphrodite Rises From the Waves.” It’s utterly hideous.

Aphrodite weighs several tons and decides on this particular day to become one with the ground floor, which happens to be where his landlady sleeps. She is not amused, and Tony is now jobless and homeless.

Unrelated signs manifest to persuade Tony to move to Paris, home of artistic freedom and a locale where his genius will surely be appreciated. He gathers all his paintings and Aphrodite and goes to France. En Route, Aphrodite meets an ironic and well-deserved death, but in the end, Tony arrives in Paris, disheveled and wet but entirely game.

1961 Paris is a beehive of intellectual and artistic pretension, and pseudo-romantic drivel prowls the lofts and the bistros like a black panther with an inferiority complex.

Tony does have one gift: the ability to spout pseudo-critical gibberish and make the most idiotic and puerile notions sound vaguely like high art. Even his roommate Paul (Paul Massie), who IS a vastly superior painter, falls for it, and eventually leaves for London to learn how to paint like the newly discovered master, Hancock. Contemptuous of his failed work, he leaves it all to Hancock.

Tony is Discovered, and becomes an overnight sensation.

And this is where my mention of Peter Sellers comes in. He did a brilliant movie, arguably his best, called Being There, in which he is a simpleton who rises to the highest levels of power and society just by what people read into his awkward silences. Like Hancock, he rose, not through any ability or merit, but simply because he was so good at appearing as what people wanted to see.

But Hancock did this 18 years earlier!

You know the inevitable crash has to come, especially since he becomes famed, not for his art, but for Paul’s, due to a mix up. And of course, it does.

And yes, it’s a feel-good movie. The ending will leave you grinning from ear to ear. It is often silly, but has moments of sheer brilliance and is perhaps Hancock’s finest work.

Available on DVD, as Call Me Genius in the States.

That Monty Python rant (most of it, anyway. It was the first Python piece I ever heard).

Yes I quite agree I mean what’s the point of being treated like sheep. What’s the point of going abroad if you’re just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea – “Oh they don’t make it properly here, do they, not like at home” – and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamari’s and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White’s sun cream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh ‘cos they “overdid it on the first day”…And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they’re acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you’re not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners…And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there’s an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney’s Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local color and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing “Torremolinos, Torremolinos” and complaining about the food – “It’s so greasy isn’t it?” – and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres.’