More Further Adventures of Wheeler and Woolsey

More Film Fun madness from 1939. I simply can't imagine Bob delivering a line like "Coo! That bad lad wants blowing up!"

The Further Adventures of Wheeler and Woolsey

Courtesy of Geoff's copy of the 1939 Film Fun Annual. Wacky hi-jinx ensue when Bert and Bob get a hold of one of those air-tight rubber horse costumes the kids are so crazy about these days. And, dear LORD!! What the heck is Bob doing to Bert's head in the banner there?? OUCH!!
And I thought the Martin and Lewis feud was vicious!

Funny Faces on the Films - part 4 (b); The Final Thrashings

by Geoff Collins

This time we've finally reached the end of our look at the weird or wonderful comedy people from Film Fun Annual 1939. Only two comedians remain unaccounted for, as different from each other as it's possible to be. Have I saved the best until last?

STANLEY LUPINO: as I mentioned in an earlier article, it puzzled me that there could be two Lupinos, one of whom used Lupino as his Christian name. This was the immortal Henry George Lupino, known professionally as Lupino Lane and privately as Nipper, a celebrated star of silent Hollywood two-reelers and 1930s London stage musicals. Versions of Me and My Girl are still touring today; Ivy and I saw this classic show at the Milton Keynes Theatre on Nov. 28th, and if Nipper was as funny as Michael Frame in the lead role, he must have been a truly great comedian. Which he was, of course...

Stanley Lupino was Nipper's cousin, or uncle, or grandad, or sister. Who knows? To avoid and also cause confusion at the same time, we offer you another look at the Lupino Family Tree, from John Parker's Who's Who in the Theatre, 1946:

Stanley's birthdate is usually given as 1893, not '94 as stated here, but I'll let you know definitely when I get a good look at his impressive monument in Lambeth Cemetery. He was Ida's dad, co-starred with Thelma Todd in You Made Me Love You (a hilarious updating of The Taming of the Shrew) and was notoriously the host of the Hollywood party from which Thelma drove home to her mysterious death. Stanley, however, didn't make any pictures in Hollywood. His thirteen movies were all made in London and were mostly cinematic versions of his stage musicals; for Stanley, like Nipper, was a superb stage comedian, often seen in partnership with the underrated and sadly underfilmed Laddie Cliff (1891-1937). Stanley and Laddie worked beautifully together; they were both small, quirky, dapper and acrobatic. Over She Goes is, in my opinion, the best example we have of what a 1930s London musical comedy looked like, and it contains one heck of a number, "Side By Side", sung and danced all around the room at lightning speed by Stanley, Laddie and the "romantic lead" John Wood. This dazzling routine can be seen on the Pathe website and includes an incredible 360-degree pan; for a few seconds the stagey country-house set seems real. (Maybe it was; the exterior shots are very impressive). In this movie, and others which Stanley usually wrote himself, he and Laddie are ex-music hall performers incongruously in love with classy society girls. After the inevitable farcical complications (dressing up, pretending to be your own long-lost uncle; you know the sort of thing) with some interesting musical interludes along the way, all ends well. In Cheer Up, aspiring songwriter Stanley has to prove to his pal Roddy Hughes (Laddie being presumably unavailable for this one) that he can write a song about anything - and he comes up with the tender ballad "Steak and Kidney Pudding, I Adore You". Now that's a collector's item.

Stanley's movies are woefully neglected and unavailable, so please search out the bits and pieces on the Pathe website and enjoy his talent. It's now known that he was a highly-strung, temperamental hypochondriac, dabbling in spiritualism (through loneliness, when his wife Connie went to Hollywood with Ida), claiming to be in communication with the ghost of Dan Leno, and frequently threatening not to go onstage due to some mystery ailment. Actually he wasn't kidding. It was cancer that eventually got him, in his late forties, so he's forgotten today; and that's a disgrace. He's buried, appropriately enough, near his idol Dan Leno. Someday soon, when I make the pilgrimage, I'll let you know all the details.

Our final character - and I use the term advisedly - is far from forgotten.

JIMMY DURANTE: "It won't be long now, folks! Ha-cha-cha!" says Jimmy "Schnozzle" Durante, straight to camera at the end of What-No Beer? in the most terrifying close-up since Nosferatu. It's not easy to be indifferent about this cheerful, ebullient entertainer. To most Americans he's Vaudeville Personified; strangely, admirers of Buster Keaton take a quite different viewpoint. Buster's career was starting to slide a bit once he'd become entangled in MGM's vice-like grip, so they brought in the Schnoz, initially as a supporting player in The Passionate Plumber (which stinks, believe me) then as a below-the-title co-star: Buster Keaton in Speak Easily with Jimmy Durante; and finally as, in effect, half of a double-act: Buster Keaton and Jimmy Durante in What-No Beer? By the time of this final effort Buster was an alcoholic mess, a fact sadly visible onscreen, and Jimmy had to carry much of the movie himself, not to everyone's satisfaction. It's one of the most vilified films ever made, as if Jimmy is being blamed personally for circumstances beyond his control. But what was he supposed to do? Nearly forty, hardly a Clark Gable lookalike, he was unlikely to say no to a top Hollywood studio anxious to promote him to star billing; and Buster's decline was by this point inevitable anyway. What-No Beer? is no classic (Speak Easily is a better movie) but Buster and Jimmy are convincing as old army pals anxious to break into the beer racket at the end of prohibition:

Mr. Jordan (financier): Well, er...this is a new enterprise for you, Jimmy. (glances at blank-faced Buster, whose naive responses have nearly undermined their scheme) Have you known your partner long?

Jimmy: Oh, yes. (all smiles) We were shell-shocked together in France.

Mr. Jordan: Oh, you were?

Jimmy: (dirty look at Buster) But I got over mine.

The movie also has a pleasantly quiet running gag, prompted by this choice bit of dialogue. It's raining outside, and taxidermist Buster removes his umbrella from a stuffed-kangaroo umbrella-stand:

Jimmy: What's that?!

Buster: That's a kangaroo.

Jimmy: A what?

Buster: A kangaroo - a native of Australia.

Jimmy: (aghast) Oh!!! (slaps his own face in horror)

Buster: What's the matter?

Jimmy: My sister married one o' dem!

The only problem with this much-maligned movie - if it is a problem - is that Jimmy, by his very nature as a performer, hardly lets Buster get a word in; and yet he did this to everybody - or so posterity would have us believe, for let's not forget, this was all scripted. Keaton fans should be more lenient towards Jimmy and his bombastic malapropisms. It's hard not to like a man who, when asked if he ever wanted to play Hamlet, replied "To hell with dose small towns - New York's da place for me!"

That's it, readers; we've Finally Finished the Funny Faces. Have a Happy [insert here whatever you intend to celebrate] and I'll be back soon with some more obscure people you've never heard of. But trust me, they're all worth the effort. Adios.

Funny Faces on the Films - part 4 (a)

by Geoff Collins

At last! We've reached the final part of Funny Faces on the Films, or Manic Mugs on the Movies, that intriguing 4-page photo feature from my beloved but crumbling Film Fun Annual 1939 in which the great and the adequate share equal billing, before time and posterity sorted 'em out. At least I can claim that this is the first part of the last part. [Later on, I may attend the party of the first part of the last part; it's that time of year, folks] Two of our subjects deserve a bit more than a cursory glance, and you, dear reader, don't want to be here all night and neither do I! So we'll get to 'em later! In the meantime...

It's Good-Natured Wimp week! Jack Haley certainly falls into that category. Not in real life, I'm sure, but it's fair to say that this most charitable and amiable of men often came across as bland and diffident on screen, apart from his well-documented and justly-praised turn as the Tin Man. By the mid-forties when he was appearing in things like Higher and Higher (a "let's put Sinatra in something - anything!"-motivated adaptation of his Broadway flop) Jack was more or less on autopilot. In People Are Funny he's so insipid that when his brilliant idea for a radio show is stolen from him by a couple of sharpies, he [apparently - please don't ask me to sit through all of it] just lets it happen. Mind you, even Stan and Ollie could pull a fast one on this Haley. Much more acerbic - and more fun, but probably for all the wrong reasons - is the wise-guy New Yorker persona he adopts in the Vitaphone short Saltwater Daffy. This excellent two-reeler is featured in the misleadingly-titled Three Stooges Early Years DVD set, and teams Haley with Shemp Howard. At least Shemp looks the part; Haley's would-be pickpocketing toughie character is totally at odds with his appearance of baby-faced innocence. Haley could do Cantorish sarcasm very well, as he proves in Follow Thru; it's a pity he wasn't allowed to do it more often. Why didn't somebody think to team him with Joan Davis?

The photo of Jack Haley "and friend" dates from 1933 and the un-named friend is Jack's Sitting Pretty co-star Jack Oakie in his costume for Paramount's woefully misjudged Alice in Wonderland (employ all the stars at your studio and render them unrecognizable!) Oakie was never a wimp of any kind: this was the man who stole an entire movie from Charlie Chaplin, with his immortal Napaloni in The Great Dictator ("You gotama carpet? Putama down!") Subsequently this cheerful double-taker became almost as chubby as he appears here, and disappeared into the morass of routine Fox musicals - although The Great American Broadcast is anything but routine, probably Jack's best starring vehicle. Like our other Jack, he enlivened many ordinary movies, glowed in a few good ones (Million Dollar Legs) and occasionally, as in The Rat Race, showed us what a sensitive actor he really was.

Another good-natured wimp: Robertson Hare. Even in his earliest appearances this bald little man looked middle-aged. He also looked worried, harassed and embarrassed. "Bunny" Hare was most comfortably placed at the top of the supporting cast, although his character was frequently made as uncomfortable as possible due to some devious plot concocted by the very best of London's stage comedians (Walls, Lynn, Henson) who used him as an unwilling stooge. "Farce" is a maligned and misunderstood word. At its best, it's a perfect art form and its history is lovingly catalogued in Brian Rix's excellent Life In the Farce Lane.

Many of the "Aldwych farces", written by Ben Travers in the 1920s for the Aldwych Theatre, were filmed in the early 30s due to the efforts of director/star Tom Walls who was just as wily a networker offscreen as he was on. Much of the fun to be had from these charming period pieces revolves around the efforts of Walls and his initially reluctant accomplice, silly-ass Ralph Lynn, to extricate themselves from some self-inflicted predicament via treachery and subterfuge. Poor Bunny Hare always got caught up in this; as a visiting vicar or some other entirely innocent petty-authority figure, he often ended up trouserless. "Oh calamity!" he would declaim in that choirmaster's voice, and we all felt for him. His humiliation was total.

Laughter and Life, an uncompleted, unreleased documentary, can be viewed on the Pathe website; it includes a warm, friendly conversation between Bunny and Sid James, leading into a lengthy clip from Aren't Men Beasts? which demonstrates perfectly the on-screen relationship between long-suffering Bunny and his frequent stage-and-screen partner, bald, bullying, overbearing Alfred Drayton. British farce at its best. Bunny was still active into his late seventies, in the TV series All Gas and Gaiters. His character was a bit more crafty but, bless him, he still looked exactly the same. Another Pathe clip shows him distributing Christmas gifts to poor children, which just about sums up this warm-hearted man.

Yet another good-natured wimp - whether in real life or not, I don't know - was Claude Dampier. Who remembers him now? He was seriously limited by his startling appearance, a tall, terminally toothy village idiot in a bowler hat, with a voice like the cultured English cousin of Peter Lorre. With this armory of horrors you can well imagine there weren't many starring roles for poor Claude. Nonetheless he was a success on radio in a double-act with his (much younger) wife Billie Carlyle, in which he gently misunderstood everything she said, and rambled on about his mysterious friend Mrs. Gibson. Claude can be seen, if memory serves, with Billie in She Shall Have Music, as a mightily irritating piano tuner in Radio Parade of 1935 ("yesss...that's right" he says, over and over again) and as an effete and frankly strange rabbit-clutching member of the teaching staff in Will Hay's early solo effort Boys Will Be Boys, although God knows what he could teach. Rabbit-clutching? The film contains one appalling moment: headmaster Hay knows that pupil Jimmy Hanley's stolen a necklace and proceeds to search him briskly. Enter Claude, to find them furiously wrestling on the floor. Hay, embarrassed, explains ""I... I was just teaching him a few tackles." "I see" says Claude, with total innocence. Gruesome; I never want to watch it again.

Claude's unique facial equipment made him a cartoonists' favourite; he's the only one of our Funny Faces to have his own cartoon strip in the Annual itself, breezing through each situation with that fixed rictus grin - and he also appears on the cover, which is enough to frighten anybody off. No wonder it's a rare book.

By a process of elimination you will have worked out that our remaining two Funny Faces are Stanley Lupino and Jimmy Durante [Nigel Bruce voice: "Amazing, Holmes; how do you do it?"] but I'll deal with them, fairly, I hope, during our next dip into this Holiest and Grailiest of movie books. [Big, terrifying close-up of Durante: "It won't be long now, folks! Ha-cha-cha!"]

Funny Faces on the Films - Part 3 (c)

by Geoff Collins

This one's a quickie. It has to be; I've spent far too much time and energy on Charming Chops in the Cheap Seats (part 3) already. My initial intention was a straightforward series of articles based on this four-page photo feature from Film Fun Annual 1939, with equal coverage given to each artiste. Easy enough, you would think. All went well until the third page. Eddie Cantor took over (there's a surprise) and demanded an article of his own ("or I won't appear!") Cliff Edwards, in a much less pushy way, also deserved, and received, his own feature; which leaves us with the remaining Page Three Guys pining away because they haven't been given equal space. Fortunately they're all dead [never thought I'd write those words: fortunately they're all dead] so they don't know they've been sidelined.

HERBERT MUNDIN was sidelined quite early. Compared to someone like Eddie Cantor, round-faced Mundin was small potatoes - in fact he looked like one - but in the 1920s he was a celebrated mainstay of West End musical comedies, a highly-regarded sketch comedian. After a few minor British comedies in the early thirties - do we know anyone who's actually seen East Lynne on the Western Front? - he was off to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune. Poor little Herbert got neither, really, but he made a good living, and he's in two films which are frequently revived. In MGM's David Copperfield he's Mr. Barkis, shyly wooing Jessie Ralph ("Barkis is willin'!"); and in The Adventures of Robin Hood he's Much the Miller's Son, shyly wooing Una O'Connor in a repeat of their romance from Cavalcade. Herbert was only forty when he died in a traffic accident on March 5, 1939, and he always looked much older than he actually was; the photo in the Film Fun Annual feature is also in Picture Show Annual 1934, so Herbert's only about thirty-five here although he looks in his fifties. Like Sid Field, whom he resembled in many ways, he had a quiet gift for unforced pathos. Never a movie star, he was an effortless, memorable scene-stealer.

JACK BUCHANAN was also a London stage star, but he was tall, debonair and good-looking, a song-and-dance smoothie with more of a chance at movie stardom than alas! poor Herbert. Jack had two cracks at Hollywood. When the talkies arrived, so did Jack; he made the now-vanished Paris, with Irene Bordoni, and the marvelous Monte Carlo with Jeanette MacDonald, in which he was recently described, unfairly but hilariously, as a "smarmy British wimp". [Who said this? Was it Richard Barrios? I like to give credit where it's due - but I promised not to reveal who called Cantor a "whiny bitch" - didn't I, Aaron?] Jack was in fact Scottish but the accent rarely surfaced. He sang romantic ballads like "Goodnight Vienna" in a soft nasal twang that could wander off-key and back again within a single word. His fans were devoted to him. And as for his dancing, well.... In Great Britain he was often compared to Fred Astaire but he wasn't really in the same league (as who would be?) He clomped about all over the stage like an Afghan hound in tap-shoes, but the miracle was that everyone believed it because he made it look so easy and graceful. Call it charisma, star power, whatever; it worked.

Back from Hollywood at the beginning of 1931, Jack spent the rest of his career as an actor-manager in the London theatres and studios. For such a major star, his movies are incredibly elusive; they were all musical comedies, a few screen originals interspersed with film versions of his stage shows such as This'll Make You Whistle, which had stage and screen versions running in the West End at the same time. The Daily Express, February 11, 1937:

"Jack Buchanan will be seen on stage and screen in adjoining houses and the same show next week. "This'll Make You Whistle" is playing in the flesh at Daly's; on the screen at the Empire.

Jack has only to walk along Lisle Street if he forgets his part."

Fortunately a scratchy old print of the film still exists so we can enjoy his duet with Elsie Randolph, "I'm in a Dancing Mood", a relaxed treat that's been excerpted in "To See Such Fun" and elsewhere. It has a dated charm that seems to sum up the entire decade. This'll Make You Whistle - they don't make titles like that any more. The one Buchanan film we'd most like to see is one of the missing ones: Break the News, co-starring Maurice Chevalier, directed by Rene Clair. How could anyone let this one get lost?

Jack's renaissance came in the early 50s with another stab at Hollywood; and many of us will have seen his outstanding turn as the megalomaniacal producer in The Band Wagon, and wondered "Who's that?" Subsequently Jack made a pleasant Eastmancolor version of his stage success As Long As They're Happy, and the disastrous swansong of Preston Sturges, The Diary of Major Thompson, which did for him what The Sin of Harold Diddlebock did for Harold Lloyd. Sadly it was Jack's swansong too. He deserves to be better remembered; but as so many of his movies have tap-danced away over the hills, never to be seen again, he's rarely mentioned now. He was an excellent song-and-dance man.

ROSCOE KARNS. Kindly allow me to have a ramble through the Roscoes. There was Roscoe Arbuckle, Rosco Ates (the spelling favored by MGM) and there was Roscoe Karns. We don't need to concern ourselves with Arbuckle, except to say that The Day the Laughter Stopped is the best book written about him; and I, Fatty is the worst book written about him (or about anybody).

Rosco Ates stuttered; was stuttering ever amusing? According to Picture Show Annual 1934, he stuttered as a child, overcame this affliction, then became nervous during his first big talkie (Cimarron) which brought it on again. He was a big hit so he carried on with it and it became a trademark. He stutters all over What-No Beer? for "comic relief" but the effect is far from comic. With some justification, he was featured in Tod Browning's Freaks. A genuine stammer can be amusing if comedic talent and timing are involved (Eli Woods, Glenn Melvyn) but not if it's false and forced (Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours; and Rosco Ates)

Roscoe Karns: still a minor player really, a character actor, but a sharp and incisive one. It's a nice coincidence that he shares the page with Cliff Edwards, because a year later he shared a newsroom with him. In His Girl Friday, Cliff is wisecracking reporter Endicott, and Roscoe Karns is wisecracking reporter McCue. It would be hard to find a reporter in this marvelous movie who isn't a wisecracker; Howard Hawks assembled a superb cast and gave everybody a chance to shine. He may have recalled Roscoe's similar turn in It Happened One Night. All our Funny Faces can claim at least one Classic Movie credit.

We've mentioned this before: if there's one fault with Flunny Flaces on the Flilms [I'm gettin' tired of this; does it show?] it's that it confuses and combines character actors with comedians. Roscoe Karns was a character actor, and a very good one; like Ned Sparks before he joined the Undead.

Hopefully part 4 will give me a lot less trouble, but I doubt it. We'll meet a Tin Man, a village idiot, and another Lupino (can't have enough of those!) We'll have an Oh Calamity! and encounter the most notorious of Buster's co-stars. Hahhhhhh! It's your toin next, folks! It won't be long now! Ha-chahhhhh! [Huge, terrifying close-up. Fade out.]

Funny Faces on the Films No.3

by Geoff Collins

It's time for another trawl through the good, the bad, and the adequate in our third look at Funny Faces on the Films, or Priceless Pusses on the Pictures. Actually this is part 3a, as one of our subjects deserves an article to himself. Cantor's too important to share one-fifth of an article with some supporting comics, so I've let him take over. He'd have done that anyway!

Regular readers, not to mention constipated ones, will recall the four-page picture feature in Film Fun Annual 1939 that generated my lifelong interest in long-buried movie comedians. In Robert Woolsey's case this was literally true: when the book was published in late '38 he was already gone, and he can be seen in the cover artwork giving a wistful glance at "1939", as if somehow knowing he'd never get there.

By 1963, when I bought the book (let me also remind you I was seven) many of Woolsey's contemporaries were also amongst the choir invisible. For some reason I had the impression that Eddie Cantor was the little pop-eyed Second Banana on the Dick Van Dyke Show. Nobody told me otherwise, and it came as a shock to see "his" obituary in the paper a little while later. Having established that Cantor-lookalike Morey Amsterdam was alive and well, I was then subjected to further confusion. Thank Your Lucky Stars was shown on TV, and there are two Eddie Cantors in it - or, in that great trick shot near the end, about eight of 'em as he plays the entire orchestra.

Eddie's main character is his usual eager, good-natured innocent, in this case a hapless little guy who can't get a showbiz job because he looks too much like Cantor; and he also plays himself as Cantor the egotistical, pushy entertainer. This baffled me: which was the real Cantor? Gradually his other movies also began to appear on British TV and I experienced the joy of those flashy Goldwyn musicals, especially Roman Scandals (and clearly our Film Fun photo is a still from it). Every Third Banana deserves a movie as good as this.

It disappointed me to find that Eddie's autobiography Take My Life, in which he endeavours to come across as a philanthropic family man, is dishonest on a minor point: he writes of the personal danger involved in filming the bullfight sequence in The Kid From Spain. This is all bull; the whole thing's done with process work and back projection. Cantor and the bull are never in the same shot. They probably never even met. We can also be a tiny bit cynical about his justifiable praise for the lovely lady Third Banana Joan Davis, now that we know she provided him with a bit more than comedy relief. He writes of Jolson's many flaws as a person but much of this could also be applied to himself. Herbert Goldman's biography Banjo Eyes exposes Cantor as being just as contradictory a man as Chaplin: generous yet grasping; kind but mean-spirited and nasty; helpful to other performers yet jealous of the laughs they got; and a man of integrity who could be dishonest on his own terms.

To his credit, in Thank Your Lucky Stars he had the courage to put all this on display, knowing, naturally, that his public would think "Awww, Eddie's not like that!" But his writers knew their man and the script sparkles with put-downs and disgusted reactions to Cantor's many failings. It's the only big-studio wartime flagwaver that's enjoyable for the whole two hours.

Yet there's still another Cantor we haven't discussed. When the long-lost 1930 movie version of Whoopee was recovered in about 1980 the world could at last see Eddie in his pre-Goldwyn guise, before the Production Code pulled Hollywood's teeth out. Here we have Cantor the Broadway Star. He's like Woody Allen on speed, a neurotic New Yorker with more than a hint of sexual ambiguity - although one of the chorus girls in the "Makin' Whoopee" number gets a particularly warm smile from him. Despite being "Henry Williams", he floods the movie with Yiddish bits. It's hardly surprising that when the Production Code came in, Whoopee vanished for fifty years. Where could they show it?

New York-Jewish Eddie is also very much to the fore in the early talkie bits and pieces he made for Paramount at the Astoria studio, such as Insurance and the "Belt-in-the-Back" tailor sketch from Glorifying the American Girl. Twenty years afterwards, as we've seen from an earlier article, he was willing to sacrifice his friendship with Lew Hearn in order to claim ownership of this sketch legally. Not Very Good, Eddie. More like Knife-in-the-Back.

Did we mention yet another Eddie Cantor, the silent film comedian? Necessarily deprived of his song-and-dance routines, he's an astonishingly subtle and adept pantomimist. It's all in That Face, and when Paramount/Universal/Whoever make Kid Boots and Special Delivery available, we'll discuss them further. They both exist; why can't we see 'em?

Eddie Cantor is easily one of the most fascinating characters in Third Banana Land. He can be very annoying; his sentimentality can make you cringe. But when he sings and dances and claps his hands and skips about, he is magical. You don't believe me? Watch him race through "Okay Toots" in Kid Millions; and then watch it again. It really is that good. And have we spoken about Cantor on radio? Or on television? Or records?

This is one of the paradoxes of Funny Faces on the Films: what is Eddie Cantor doing on the same page as Mundin, Buchanan, Edwards and Karns? Characteristically he's used up all their space! Complaints should be addressed to Mundin, Buchanan, Edwards and Karns, Attorneys and Commissioners for Oaths. I rest my case. It's a bit heavy anyway.

A voice from somewhere in the back of my head (with ukulele accompaniment) suggests that I may have been a bit unfair to Mr. Edwards.

To be continued....

Funny Faces on the Films - Part Two

by Geoff Collins

As Ted Healy often remarks during the course of Beer and Pretzels, here I go with another load. Not a load of old rubbish, though. Far from it: for this is part 2 of Funny Faces on the Films (or, if you like, Comic Countenances on the Kinema; I'll have a job topping that one), that wonderful four-page photo section within my beloved Film Fun Annual 1939. Legends mingle with obscurities; but if I recall correctly, I promised you that for our second episode, four out of the five comedians would be Third Bananas - and I'll stand by that statement. The first two are comedy legends; but hardly anyone's heard of Will Hay in the States; and W. C. Fields isn't that well-remembered in Britain. How's that? Did I get away with it?

Will Hay. Our readers in the UK will be smiling now as they think of Will Hay, the only comedian to make British music-hall comedy work well on the screen in Britain. (Chaplin and Laurel, let's not forget, made their films in Hollywood) Will Hay? Our American readers will be saying "Who???" so let me explain. Will Hay dominated British film comedy in the late 'thirties. It's a curiously British trait to recognise, accept and tolerate managerial inefficiency and petty bureaucracy. We've been "led by donkeys" for centuries; our most effective weapon is mockery. We've all known a Will Hay, a prosaic buffoon who's attained a position of minor authority through deviousness and trickery. In his movies, Will's wily enough to get the job but ultimately he's just too incompetent to do it properly. Unlike Robb Wilton's bumbling, good-natured variation on the same character, shifty-eyed Will is fully aware that he's useless and has to use all his cunning to disguise the fact. Consequently his employees, usually disrespectful fat boy Graham Moffatt ("Albert") and senile, crafty octogenarian Moore Marriott ("Harbottle") have this power over him. They spend much of the films' running time arguing and bickering, as they weave convoluted solutions to essentially minor problems. Oh, Mr. Porter! is the accepted masterpiece, but in my opinion Ask a Policeman is funnier as it gets to the main course straight away; it's my favourite comedy of all time.

The Full Monty, I seem to recall, was advertised as "the funniest British comedy since Four Weddings and a Funeral". So what? It was the only British comedy since Four Weddings and a Funeral. Now if they'd called it the funniest British comedy since Ask a Policeman.... that would be something.

After Will Hay, another scoundrel who devotes much energy to covering his tracks: W. C. Fields. Bill essentially played two characters: the desperately-henpecked husband with a monstrous family, who fights back in his own small way by muttering vaguely blasphemous asides, until the worm finally turns and he regains his self-respect (It's a Gift, You're Telling Me, The Bank Dick); and the much more extrovert pompous windbag, down on his luck in some seedy backwater of showbiz, always just one step ahead of his creditors (Poppy, The Old-Fashioned Way, You Can't Cheat an Honest Man).

Fully aware of posterity and the chance to make an easy "authorship" $50,000, Bill rarely missed an opportunity to include fragments of his stage sketches in his movies; so one is always aware of a discreet sense of familiarity and repetition. He also used his films to express revenge over long-harbored grudges. Supporting characters are often based on, or named after, real people who'd pissed him off in the past, including his own estranged son Claude who's usually represented - by such as Grady Sutton - as an unpleasant, blubbery, indolent wimp.

Some of Bill's sketches, and his blustery "sporting gent" characterization, bear a strong resmblance to the work of the British music-hall comedian Harry Tate; and there's a reason for this, which we'll discuss at a later date. In the meantime, all you Fields admirers are strongly advised to have a look at Tate's sketches on [yes, he's going to mention it!] www.britishpathe.com.

Bill Fields a Third Banana? Hardly; but in Great Britain you'd have to struggle to find any of his work on DVD; and that's not fair.

Leslie Henson. When I bought my Film Fun Annual 1939 at the age of seven (in 1963, not 1939, I hasten to add!) this photo of Leslie Henson jumped out of the page at me. The jumping analogy is apt: he looks like a frog! Many years passed before I located one of Leslie's records - Tell the Doc, from the stage version of Funny Face - and, wonder of wonders, he sounds like a frog as well. The total effect is astonishing. I've covered Leslie (in glory, I hope) in a previous article. His personality is so strong, even in photographs, that I've managed to accumulate a large collection of Hensonalia simply because he's instantly recognisable. You wade through a mass of bland, nondescript faces in old 1930s magazines, and POW! there he is again. It seems incredible that after World War Two he was considered so unamusing that the West End managers were reluctant to employ him, but that's what happened.

Stanley Holloway, his best pal, describes Leslie's decline very movingly in "Wiv a Little Bit O'Luck"; but we won't dwell on that. Let's just remember that in the 1930s, on the London stage, Leslie Henson was the Top Man. The Pathe website [oh, there he goes again!] has some fine examples, both silent and croaky, of his incredible range; and for your entertainment, here's my most recently discovered piece of Hensonalia.

click on the thumbnail yada yada...

Lupino Lane. Now we're talking. It always struck me as odd that these Film Fun Annual photos included two Lupinos, one of whom used Lupino as his first name. We'll get to Stanley Lupino in a later article, but for the time being....

Lupino Lane was born Henry George Lupino, and he was a member of the celebrated Lupino family of clowns, acrobats and dancers. He was distantly related to Stanley Lupino, whom we'll meet later; to untangle the genealogy would result in a long monologue along the lines of He's His Own Grandpa. To avoid this, we'll just show you the Lupino Family Tree (from Who's Who in the Theatre, 1946). It'll save a lot of time:

click etc...

It also seems odd that Lupino Lane has never received the acclaim he deserves. His career covered just about every aspect of showbusiness, and he excelled in all of it. In brief: he started in British music-hall as an acrobatic "boy comedian". He took the surname Lane as a tribute to his beloved maternal grandmother Sara Lane, and turned his real surname into a Christian name in order to retain his proud association with the Lupino dynasty; hence "Lupino Lane". His son, an equally gifted comedian briefly glimpsed in a decorating routine in A King in New York, and as the laughing fat man hit with a pie in Carry On Loving, was Lauri Lupino Lane.

"Lupino Lane" is a bit of a mouthful; mostly he was known as Nipper or Nip. He made a large number of American silent comedies in which his acrobatic skills are the equal of Keaton's. All that's lacking, and this is the thing, sadly, that matters most in terms of immortality, is a consistent comic characterization. During most of the 1930s he was a star of London stage musical comedies, notably Me and My Girl, which is still revived today. In this he finally found a comedy persona that worked for him: the little cockney Bill Snibson who inherits a Dukedom. This show also gave him the hit song The Lambeth Walk, and it took over his life. He did over a thousand performances, made the film version (The Lambeth Walk; it was long thought to be lost but apparently there's an extant print with French subtitles. It's an important movie; why isn't it being shown anywhere?) and he even took the Snibson character into other, similar shows such as Meet Me Victoria. The programme's cover art is a fine example of "a picture paints a thousand words"; here you have Nipper Lane exactly.

It'll take a longer article than this to do justice to Nipper. While you're waiting for myself or Aaron to get around to writing it, you may enjoy his talents on www.britishpathe.com. Pathe caught him several times, and often at his very best, including a couple of live performances. You haven't heard the last of Nipper.

Ned Sparks. Ned Sparks???? Oops. I seem to remember that I said I wouldn't reveal which of our five subjects wasn't a Third Banana; so in order to keep my promise, let's take a look at that versatile King of Comedy, mega-talented Ned Sparks.

All right, the jig is up. I lied to you. Canadian-born Sparks growled his mainly unfunny lines in a flat monotone, had glazed staring eyes and looked like a Keaton crossed with a zombie. He wasn't a comedian at all. He was a character actor with only one character, and although he starred in some late-silent Educational comedies, he was most often seen as a hard-boiled, pessimistic theatrical agent or stage manager - as in Forty-Second Street. Ned's inclusion amongst all these star comedians is probably due to his rare leading role in a 1936 British production, Two's Company. For a brief moment, in Britain at least, he was among the top names; and then it was back to the "stage managers".

"Radio's Fred Allen" - a Ned lookalike and soundalike if ever there was one - made his feature film debut in a "Sparks part" in Thanks a Million, and did so with such wit, sparkle and immaculate comic timing that he turned a routine Dick Powell musical into a delightful experience. That's the difference.

Well, that's about it, readers. In part three we'll meet only two Third Bananas.

Don't go 'way now!

Funny Faces on the Films No. 1

by Geoff Collins

Although lack of inspiration has tempted me to have yet another look at MGM's flatulent blob The Great Ziegfeld - and I've still got quite a bit to say about it, believe me - I decided to turn instead to my beloved Film Fun Annual 1939. I paid three old English pence (about one and a half pence in the current decimal coinage) for this gem of a book at a garden fete in Bedford in 1963 when I was seven years old. Both the garden and the beautiful Victorian house are no more, flattened to make way for the Lurke Street Multi-Storey Car Park, which is even more of a tasteless monstrosity than The Great Ziegfeld; but I still have the book, albeit in a battered, fragile and mouldy state - and so is the book. I can genuinely state that this book generated my fascination - some of you, Aaron included, might call it an obsession - with archaic and obscure comedy, a passion which persists to this day. What do I care? It's been a lot more fun than train-spotting.

Film Fun was a weekly children's comic in Great Britain, presided over in the early days by "Eddie the Happy Editor" (Fred Cordwell, who occasionally appeared as evil mastermind Professor Lewdroc - "Cordwell" nearly backwards - in photo shoots for the Jack Keen detective stories). Initially there was a sister paper, The Kinema Comic, which ceased publication in 1932, leaving Film Fun unique in that its comic strip stories featured real comedians of the time in downmarket urban settings which would have been familiar to the majority of its readers. By the early 1960s most of these comedy stars had vanished off the face of the earth. I'd heard of Laurel and Hardy because the BBC regularly screened their shorts; and Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy had recently been released, introducing me to the joys of this eager 'twenties go-getter. But who the hell were Wheeler and Woolsey? Or Sydney Howard? Or Joe E. Brown? Or Claude Dampier? Or Claude Hulbert? Who were these people? It took the best part of forty years before I was able to see all of them on film - and I've still only seen glimpses of Sydney Howard (in Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, his only Hollywood movie). And to add to the mystery, in mid-book there's a superb four-page photo feature, Funny Faces on the Films, which looks very odd today. Genuine screen legends share the page with total obscurities. But some of the obscurities are genuine Third Bananas, wonderful comedians who've been forgotten altogether. Not always the case of course. For example:

Charles Ruggles, who's seen here registering disgust at an evil-tasting cup of tea. It's a funny photo; but sad to say, you won't get many laughs out of Charlie. In the 30s he was Paramount's all-purpose Resident Comedian, starring in a series of bland domestic comedies with Mary Boland. Rarely memorable, his one legendary scene occurs in If I Had a Million when his henpecked, Milquetoasty character suddenly discovers he's been left a million dollars. "The worm turns", and in no time at all he's smashed up a shopful of china. Unforgivably, he played Victor Moore's stage role in the movie of Anything Goes (not his fault; he would never intend to offend anybody) but instead of rising to the occasion, he turned in his usual unadventurous performance. Returning to the stage for most of the 40s and 50s, he re-surfaced on TV in a weird semi-sitcom, performed "live" - although "half-dead" would be more appropriate - called The Ruggles. Not only was it grammatically incorrect (because the singular of Ruggles is "a Ruggle"!) but it was badly made and attempted to be cute, coy and philosophical, and it's difficult to keep your food down while watching it. We won't mention it again.

My dad remembers Charlie Ruggles with great affection, and it's clear from Charlie's movies that he was a very nice, kind man. He was more of a character actor than a comedian; and he occasionally appeared in things like Trouble in Paradise and Bringing Up Baby. Need I say more? And so we move on to...

Wally Patch. Who??? His brief period of fame came with the London stage run of Reluctant Heroes in 1950, in which he played the gruff Cockney sergeant. Sadly he wasn't in the film version; Ronald Shiner got the role. The result? Instant stardom for Ron, and the chance to inflict his strident persona on the filmgoing public for the rest of the decade, until everybody was heartily sick of him. Wally Patch needn't have worried though, and probably didn't. He was continually in full employment, a reliable bit-player in a vast number of British films from about 1919 onwards, usually cast as a burly but friendly working-class Londoner. Sensibly, Wally didn't wander outside his range; as a consequence his characters are always believable and real. Like Sidney James, Wally didn't seem to be acting at all - which is the secret of the whole thing.

Who's Who in the Theatre tells us that his real name was Walter Vinnicombe. He was married to Emmeline; and he lived at 42 Fairhazel Gardens, South Hampstead, London NW6. His telephone number was Maida Vale 3067. Just thought you'd like to know that!

Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn. My initial source of information about all these obscure people was my dad; and he spoke very warmly about these two fellows. Walls and Lynn were usually teamed - although both made frequent solo appearances - in what became known as the "Aldwych farces", stage comedies written by Ben Travers for the Aldwych Theatre in London. Walls played a middle-aged roue, a totally unscrupulous bullying rascal - and by all accounts he was like this in real life, irresponsibly missing many of his stage performances because he was at the races (his horse April the Fifth won the 1932 Derby). His understudy was so gainfully employed that some people claimed to have seen all the Aldwych farces without seeing Tom Walls! Do I need to add that he was what we'd now call an operator? His networking skills led to an arrangement with British and Dominion Films whereby most of the plays were filmed with the original casts. Directed (usually) by Walls in that "put it in front of the camera and film it" manner associated with the Astoria studios in New York (e.g. Animal Crackers) they are priceless records of 1920s London stage comedy. By 1935 Travers was writing original film scripts, and the results, such as Stormy Weather, looked a bit more like movies.

Ralph Lynn was the "romantic lead", although by the time the film versions started in 1929-30 he was already forty-five and, let's face it, the camera showed it. (On stage he didn't get any close-ups.) He was the monocled "silly ass", invariably conned by Walls into embarking on some ill-advised cunning plan which was bound to backfire, involving all concerned in a flurry of mistaken identity, running about, hiding in cupboards and inappropriate disguise.

The supporting casts usually included Mary Brough as the tough old dowager with the heart of gold; gorgeous Winifred Shotter as Ralph's love interest, although she was young enough to be his daughter; and, best of all, madrigal-voiced stodgy baldie Robertson Hare ("Oh calamity!") as an innocent dullard caught up in Walls' trickery. Inevitably "Bunny" Hare would lose his trousers, and his dignity.

God knows where you'll see these films now, but if they turn up anywhere, don't miss 'em. The Pathe website [my God! he got this far without mentioning it!!!] has a few tantalising clips. They haven't lasted all that well, but even if they don't amuse you, enjoy the social history.

Charles Butterworth looks a bit sick, doesn't he? Poor chap. Who's heard of him now? Another rare one - but don't worry, readers, in the next article, four out of five will be Third Bananas. I'm not telling you which four.

My first visual experience of Charles Butterworth was in The Boys From Syracuse. He's a Roman senator (forgive me if I'm wrong here; I haven't seen this film for thirty years) whose every entrance is heralded by a fanfare, the final part of which is in an incongruous "swing style" which causes him mild but increasing irritation throughout the movie. It's a beautifully understated piece of comedy acting.

Charles Butterworth rarely made a fuss. He was often a middle-aged rich bachelor ineptly in pursuit of a much younger woman. One of his most typical, and most widely-available performances is in the public-domain stinker Second Chorus, the one with, wait for it, 41-year-old Fred Astaire as a collegian jazz trumpeter. (Partly thanks to Aaron, I now have three copies of this, each with a different credit sequence) Butterworth is rich Mr. Chisholm who's hopelessly in love with Paulette Goddard. (In the movie, she goes for Fred; in real life, she went for Charlie - Chaplin, that is.) To be honest, Butterworth's performance as a rich stiffened-by-booze alcoholic required no acting ability whatsoever. But - and I'll admit it's not saying much - he's the best thing in the film. Like that other bland Charles - Ruggles, that is - Butterworth sometimes stumbled into classic movies like Love Me Tonight. But despite the boozy haze that permeates everything he does - or maybe because of it! - I feel he is the better actor, always adding something special to the movie he's in.

Hugh Herbert. Woo woo! Occasionally confused with screenwriter F. Hugh Herbert, Hugh was a star of cheap Columbia two reelers (who wasn't? - and what other kind of Columbia two-reeler is there?) and a supporting player in feature films, especially Warner Bros. musicals such as Colleen, Wonder Bar and, especially, Dames, which may contain his definitive performance. Facially very similar to the English music-hall comedian Stainless Stephen [there will now be a brief pause while you all say "who cares?"] Hugh's eccentric hand-flapping woo-wooing was probably the inspiration for Daffy Duck, which in itself is a kind of immortality.

In my humble opinion, Hugh was wonderful, probably the only true Third Banana out of the six comedians we've looked at so far (all right, all right, Ralph Lynn qualifies too). If you ever get to see that so-rare phenomenon Hellzapoppin - and when are you bastards who own the rights going to release it on DVD? - you'll be astonished by Hugh's marginal and seemingly unimportant role as the detective. It's not much of a part, but what he does with it! Talking to the camera, telling his mother in the audience that he'll be late home for dinner ("Have meat!"), and, unforgettably, showing us what a master of disguise he is by popping out from behind a tree several times in quick succession, each time in a different costume and hat ("Don't ask me how I do it, folks!") Hugh provides one of those rare occasions where the supporting comic is more memorable than the stars; and as the stars here are Olsen and Johnson, that's quite an achievement.

More Funny Faces to follow. Watch this space!

A Very Merry Christmas to You and Yours!

In honor of the Christmas season, I'm presenting this Christmas-y two-page Film Fun comic from 1954 featuring Arthur Lucan, aka Old Mother Riley. Be sure to check out Martyn Peter Wilkinson's Old Mother Riley tribute site. It's chock full of info about Britain's most popular pre-Dame Edna drag act, but is disappointingly short on details regarding Lucan's nightmarish marriage to stage "daughter" and manager Kitty McShane. I highly recommend Frank Dello Stritto and Andi Brooks' Vampire Over London: Bela Lugosi In Britain for a recounting of the filming of Lucan's last feature, Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952), that'll make your hair stand on end. Lucan collapsed and died in the wings just before making his entrance in Old Mother Riley in Paris at the Tivoli Theatre, Hull, in 1954.

click the thumbnails

"OOER!"

An appropriately spooky 1954 Joe E. Brown comic from the pages of the UK comic weekly Film Fun. Joe hadn't starred in a film in years when this was published. (click on the thumbnails)

.. and for those curious (and brave) among you...
Tripe and Onions

600ml (1 pint) Milk

450g (1lb) Dressed Tripe, washed
25g (1oz) Butter
3 Medium Onions, sliced
3 tbsp Plain Flour
1 Bay Leaf
Pinch Grated Nutmeg
Fresh Parsley

Place the tripe in a saucepan and cover with cold water.
Bring to the boil.
Remove from the heat, drain.
Rinse under cold running water.
Cut into 2.5cm (1 inch) pieces.
Place the tripe, milk, onions, bay leaf and nutmeg into a saucepan.
Bring to the boil, cover and simmer for 2 hours or until tender.
Remove from the heat, strain and reserve the liquid.
Keep the tripe and onions warm.
Melt the butter in the saucepan, stir in the flour and cook gently for 2 minute, stirring constantly.
Make the liquid up to 600ml (1 pint) with milk or cream, gradually add to the saucepan, stirring constantly.
Bring to the boil and simmer until the sauce thickens.
Garnish with parsley.
Serve with potatoes and seasonal vegetables.