by Gregg Rickman

[1]

The Ladykillers [2]

Land of both the stiff upper lip and the ministry of silly walks, England has long had both a highly respectable public culture along with a disreputable underground tradition of broad comedy. In Britain, the chief conduit for lower class comedy for years was the music hall, but the tradition has remained alive for many more years in the cinema (in the 1930s, in the Carry On… series of the 1960s) and on television (Benny Hill [3]). At the same time upper class England has a long tradition of satire and keen verbal wit, apparent in the plays of George Bernard Shaw [4] and Noel Coward [5] in the early 20th century, coming to the fore in the postwar comedies produced by Ealing Studio. The coarse and fine threads of British comedy were at last firmly knitted together in the radio and TV work of the 1950s and later in such productions as The Goon Show, Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python's Flying Circus [6] and their filmic spinoffs. These different traditions continue to jostle, with often fine results, today.

Heritage Cinema

Britain, of course, has one of the world's finest literary traditions, some of which is in large measure comic: Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonathan Swift, William Shakespeare [7], Charles Dickens [8], Oscar Wilde [9]. Attempts to adapt these men's comedies to film have produced variable results. The medieval poet Chaucer inspired the very peculiar A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell [10] and Emeric Pressburger [11], 1944) and Pier Paolo Pasolini [12]'s unfunny The Canterbury Tales [13] of 1971. Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," defanged, has been largely left to non-British animators, as has Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland [14] stories.

[15]

Albert Finney [16] in Tom Jones [17]

Henry Fielding's bawdy Tom Jones (one of literature's first novels) was the source of a very popular, Oscar-winning English film [18] by Tony Richardson [19] in 1963, full of juicy performances by some of England's legions of great character actors, and a star-making turn in the title role by Albert Finney [20]. (A later attempt [21], on the BBC, was less successful.) William Makepeace Thackeray's great satire Vanity Fair inspired Hollywood's first three-strip Technicolor film, Becky Sharp, in 1935, and a 2004 version with an American actress, Reese Witherspoon [22], incongruously cast in the lead. The very American Witherspoon was also miscast in the 2002 version of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest [23], but fortunately there is a splendid all-British 1952 version [24] that fully conveys Wilde's delicious wit and amusing narrative contrivances. Other Wilde plays on film include many versions of Lady Windermere's Fan [25], An Ideal Husband (including the recent version [26] with Rupert Everett [27], and a fine 1969 production [28]), and his more serious projects Salome [29] and The Portrait of Dorian Gray (setting aside no less than three biopics that play up the pathos of his later life, including this one [30] with Stephen Fry [31]).

Charles Dickens wrote some of the funniest books ever written, but there is no great critical following for the 1954 Pickwick Papers. Getting better reactions are the comic turns of W.C. Fields [32] in the 1935 Hollywood version of David Copperfield, and Frances L. Sullivan in both of David Lean [33]'s impressive Dickens adaptations, Great Expectations [34] (1946) and Oliver Twist [35] (1948).

While the greatest Shakespearean films draw upon his tragedies and histories, there are worthy film versions of the comedies, going back to 1936's As You Like It, with Laurence Olivier [36]. Orson Welles [37]' Spanish-made Falstaff (a.k.a. Chimes at Midnight, 1966) contains the funniest single Shakespearean performance on film (Welles' own as the rotund coward). More recently, along with all else the Bard penned, the comedies have been subject to variably successful international co-productions: thus Keanu Reeves [38] in Much Ado About Nothing [39] in 1993.

Theatrical Beginnings

The British film industry, caught between healthier film industries in Europe and in Hollywood, was especially weak in the silent era, and while the English music hall produced some of comedy's greatest stars - Charlie Chaplin [40], Stan Laurel [41], Cary Grant [42] - they did the great bulk of their work in the US. Historians will note that Chaplin's early comedies frequently recreate classic music hall acts (e.g., 1915's A Night in the Show [43]) and that his last American film, Limelight [44] (1952) is a moving tribute to the halls in the form of the aged comic Calvero (Chaplin). (Ironically, Chaplin's two British-made films, 1957's A King in New York [45] and 1967's A Countess from Hong Kong [46], are set in the US and on a boat, respectively.)

Sound brought new life to British cinema, but most of its commercially successful work was not exportable. The great stars of British comedy in the 1930s were music hall performers - Gracie Fields [47], Will Hay, George Formby [48] - whose films had little play in London's West End, but did extremely well in Northern England. Given the parallels between music hall and American vaudeville, some of these stars had rough equivalents in the US - the seedy incompetent played by Hay is often compared with W.C. Fields, and a group called The Crazy Gang made several films along the lines of the Marx Brothers [49]'. Unfortunately even modern British audiences have no access to these films on video or DVD, although patterns are laid down in those films that play out through British comedies down to the present day. Formby's little man character reappeared in the popular comedies of Norman Wisdom in the 1950s. Hay was often tormented in his films by an old duffer played by Moore Marriott, and a chubby, arrogant youngster played by Graham Moffat (as in Hay's 1937 masterpiece Oh, Mr. Porter!), a dynamic recreated in the popular TV comedy-mystery series Lovejoy (1986-1994), with its con-man hero (Ian McShane [50]) and staff consisting of the old duffer Tink (Sutton Roley) and dim assistant Eric (Chris Bury).

Sir Alexander Korda [51] was England's most successful filmmaker in the 1930s and some of his widely seen films (1933's The Private Life of Henry VIII, 1934's The Private Life of Don Juan) have strong comic elements. The theatrical successes of London's upper class West End did provide source material for a few motion pictures that were exported to the US and still can be seen today. The philosophical comedies of George Bernard Shaw received two justly famous adaptations, the still impressive Pygmalion [52] (1938) and Major Barbara (1941). With its brilliant dialogue and compelling relationship between Professor Higgins (Leslie Howard [53]) and the guttersnipe (Wendy Hiller [54]) he bets he can make a lady of, Pygmalion survives memories of its still more famous musical adaptation (My Fair Lady [55]) and the romantic happy ending it hints as possible (over Shaw's express wishes).

[56]

Alfred Hitchcock [57]'s Rich and Strange [58]

Still, the only "British comedies" of the period that may be seen readily are the 1930s thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock [59], many of which have comic elements (most especially 1938's The Lady Vanishes [60], which even includes a brief impression of Will Hay by star Michael Redgrave [61]). One important comedy Hitchcock made outside of the thriller genre that deserves mention is Rich and Strange [62] (1932), a deeply ironic tale of a bickering couple who come into money, embark on a world cruise, suffer a series of devastating misadventures, and return home none the wiser. Hitchcock retained a droll, "typically English" wit throughout his long Hollywood career, which only occasionally was given its head in the off-beat comedies The Trouble with Harry [63] (1955) and his last film, Family Plot [64] (1976).

Ealing

Throughout the 1940s and the turmoil of world war and its aftermath, British cinema remained parochial. A few more successful plays were filmed, including Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (1946) and Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit [65] (directed by David Lean in 1945), about a remarried widower (Rex Harrison) haunted by the ghost of his first wife. Some of the brilliant and eccentric work of the directing-writing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger can be considered comic, most notably the affecting romance I Know Where I'm Going! [66] (1945), with Wendy Hiller [67] as a headstrong young woman becalmed on the Scottish seacoast.

Finally in the late 1940s a series of deeply English comedies became successful worldwide. Hitchcock's producer in the 1930s, Michael Balcon, had headed up the small Ealing Studio since 1938, running it as an extended family and bringing along its young talent. The same actors, screenwriters (T.E.B. Clark, William Rose) and directors were given career opportunities with these films. From 1948 to 1955 Ealing produced a series of brilliant comedies that mirrored the United Kingdom's transition from the cozy Little England of the past to the industrialized Britain of the postwar era, framing the stories so that coziness is triumphant. Thus, a rediscovered medieval treaty allows a small corner of London to evade rationing (Henry Cornelius' Passport to Pimlico, 1949), wily seacoast villagers evade attempts to prevent them smuggling in whisky (Alexander Mackendrick [68]'s Tight Little Island, a.k.a. Whisky Galore!, 1949), and a cranky barge captain frustrates an American businessman's demands for efficient delivery (Mackendrick's High and Dry, a.k.a. The Maggie, 1954).

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Alec Guinness [70] in Kind Hearts and Coronets [71]

The multitalented chameleon Alec Guinness [72] became a star with his widely diverse portrayals of all eight victims of mass murderer Dennis Price [73] in Kind Hearts and Coronets [74] (Robert Hamer, 1949), the timid clerk turned gold thief of The Lavender Hill Mob [75] (Charles Crichton [76], 1951), the obsessed scientist whose great invention turns all England against him in The Man in the White Suit [77] (Mackendrick, 1951) and as the gap-toothed leader of a criminal gang in The Ladykillers [78] (Mackendrick, 1955). Two comedies of mass murder, Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers bookend Ealing's great run, the first a deadly satire of class (as outsider Price works his way up to nobility), the latter an affirmation of cozy Little England as a sweet old lady destroys Guinness' ruthless gang. (Stripped of its social context, the Coen Brothers [79]' 2004 remake of The Ladykillers [80] was rather pointless.)

For many around the world, Ealing's films are still the image of England and were widely copied at home in non-Ealing films that feel like them: Cornelius' Genevieve (1953), Basil Dearden [81]'s The Smallest Show on Earth [82] (1957). Even more recently, the Ealing formula can always raise a smile, and sometimes create a hit, as for example Bill Forsyth [83]'s Local Hero [84] (1983): wily seacost villagers frustrate American oilmen. And when John Cleese [85] sought a director for his 1988 farce A Fish Called Wanda [86] he brought Ealing director Charles Crichton out of a twenty-year retirement.

Into the 1960s

The Ladykillers was the third film of a young actor, Peter Sellers [87], who would become the face of British comedy worldwide for the next two decades. Sellers first made his mark as part of the popular radio series The Goon Show, which traded in absurdist humor and wordplay and thus established a mass entertainment beachhead for humor best appreciated by college grads.

[88]

Peter Sellers [89], Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan [90] rehearse for The Goon Show in 1968

A cult hit, there was one Goon feature (Down Among the Z Men, 1952), and Sellers' fellow Goons (Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan [91]) had long careers themselves. Following Guinness' footsteps from versatile character actor to international star, Sellers was ubiquitous in late 1950s/early 1960s British cinema in a variety of parts: as a senile usher in The Smallest Show on Earth, as a smarmy game show host in Your Past in Showing (Mario Zampi, 1957), a trade union boss in I'm All Right, Jack [92] (John Boulting, 1959). I'm All Right, Jack was one of several successful comedies by John Boulting [93] and his producer brother Roy that took satirical swipes at modern England (among other places) and Sellers, along with leading man Ian Carmichael [94], was in all of them. Sellers' three roles in the classic British-made atomic war satire Dr. Strangelove [95] (Stanley Kubrick [96], 1964) was the apotheosis of this stage of his career. With his Hollywood success in the Pink Panther [97] series, beginning that same year with The Pink Panther [98] and A Shot in the Dark [99], he began his second career as an international star, although like Guinness he continued to pop up in British comedies (The Wrong Box, 1966; The Magic Christian, 1969) for some time to come.

New Generation

[100]

The Goons, the Boultings, and Sellers were the vanguard for a new postwar generation of comedians, breaking as decisively with the down-market music hall tradition as postwar American stand-up comics like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce broke with corny old American vaudeville. In England, many of the new comedians were Oxford or Cambridge-educated, notably the four comics (Peter Cook [101], Dudley Moore [102], Jonathan Miller [103] and Alan Bennett [104]) who became well-known in the early 1960s in cabaret and on TV as the "Beyond the Fringe" troupe, and then the five actor-writers (Graham Chapman [105], John Cleese, Eric Idle [106], Terry Jones [107], Michael Palin [108], plus the American animator and future filmmaker Terry Gilliam [109]) who united as Monty Python's Flying Circus [110] for a BBC-TV series [111] in 1969-74, and for subsequent films. Cook and Moore also had a run in the cinema (supporting parts in The Wrong Box, starring in and scripting the hilarious religious satire Bedazzled, in 1967). The humor of all of these comedians was dexterous, highly verbal, full of topical references, and merciless toward Britain's old institutions. They were joined in disrespect by other significant talents, such as expatriate Americans Kubrick, Terry Southern [112] (screenwriter for Dr. Strangelove and The Magic Christian), and director Richard Lester [113].

Lester, a TV director, made an amateur film with Sellers in 1959 (The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film) that received a fair amount of attention. Interested in both the silent comedy tradition (witness his casting of Buster Keaton [114] in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum [115] in 1966) and in the jump-cutting, handheld camera style of New Wave European cinema that broke at the turn of the decade, he scored a huge international success in his two films with the Beatles, A Hard Day's Night [116] in 1964 and Help! [117] in 1965. Three of his subsequent films built on these innovations and are major British comedies of their time: a frantic sex comedy, The Knack [118] (1965); a satire of World War II movies, How I Won the War [119] (1967); and the post-apocalyptic farce The Bed Sitting Room (1969). The latter film, based on a play by Spike Milligan, and featuring Milligan, Harry Secombe, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and Lester regulars Rita Tushingham [120] and Roy Kinnear [121], serves as a tribute to the spirit of the Goons and their successors and also marked a tombstone for the spirit of Swinging London that Lester's earlier films had incarnated.

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