At the 1962 BAFTAs Tony Hancock received a nomination for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles. He was nominated for The Rebel, which was penned by his regular writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and stars Hancock as a frustrated office worker who dreams of being an artist. When he gives up his job to go to Paris he is first feted, then humiliated by the art establishment, including a deliciously superior George Sanders as a high-class art dealer.
The film was a critical and commercial success; Lucien Freud later told Galton and Simpson that it was the best film ever made about modern art. But when they began to write a follow-up, Hancock took months to commit to a story. He did, however, get excited about an idea called The Day Off, about a London bus conductor on his day off, a Jacques Tati-influenced comedy with a melancholic love affair.
Encouraged by Hancock, Galton and Simpson wrote the entire script, only for Hancock, who wanted a Hollywood career, to turn it down as “not international enough”. Galton and Simpson filed the script away and it lay unread until 2011, when it was discovered by their biographer Christopher Stevens and will now receive its world premiere performance at the London Comedy Film Festival.
The Day Off would have been released in 1962, the year that the post-war era ended and the ’60s really began. As a cinema-goer that year you would have had a remarkable range of choices. On the one hand, there were still reminders of the ’50s British tradition, with films like the Go To Blazes, in which a trio of incompetent crooks steal a fire engine to use as a getaway car.
Charming, elegant and playful, it has all the gritty realism of a Fortnum and Mason Christmas hamper, and a cast list that’s a who’s who of classic British comedy: not just Robert Morley, Dennis Price and Miles Malleson but also television favourites like John le Mesurier, Hugh Lloyd and Arthur Lowe. And that’s not forgetting Maggie Smith, who plays a double-dealing femme fatale who would certainly not be allowed through the doors of Downton.
But the same year also saw the emergence of a new, social realist spirit with the release of Ridley Scott’s first short film, Boy and Bicycle, Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Bryan Forbes’ The L-Shaped Room and John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving. These films were dark and daring, with graphic depictions of poverty and a campaigning socialist spirit. And they featured a new breed of actors, like Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Tom Bell, who seemed to live in a different world to Terry-Thomas or Dennis Price.
And then there was Lolita. As the posters put it, “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”. Stanley Kubrick’s rich dark adaptation starred James Mason, Shelley Winters and a brilliant, demented Peter Sellers as Humbert Humbert’s nemesis, Quilty. Set in America but filmed in England, it was no less shocking for so being bitterly funny, as Mason calmly sipped champagne in a bathtub while receiving condolence calls on Winters’ death. This was a far cry both from the innocence of Go To Blazes, or even the innuendo of Carry on Cruising, which was also released that year.
All these films have their equivalents in British cinema today. Fifty years later you can see the spirit of Go To Blazes in Richard Curtis comedies, of Kubrick’s dark satiric vision in Chris Morris’ Four Lions, and of the great British realist tradition in Andrea Arnold, Shane Meadows and Paddy Considine. But perhaps the real game-changer was on the 5th October 1962, when Dr. No had its premiere in London. This year, as Sam Mendes films Bond 23, Skyfall, in exotic locations worldwide — and Bognor — the remarkable legacy of 1962 lives on.
Go To Blazes and The Day Off form a 1962 double bill at the London Comedy Film Festival on Sunday January 29 at BFI Southbank. The Day Off will be read by a full cast, followed by a Q&A with Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. Tickets are available from the BFI box office 020 7928 3232 or locofilmfestival.com.
Jonathan Wakeham is the co-founder and programmer of the London Comedy Film Festival.
London Comedy Film Festival 2012 – The Day Off (text) by Jonathan Wakeham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
