ianlouisiana Review of Call Me Genius

Call Me Genius (1961)

Rebel without applause.Distance has lent enchantment to flop.

[9/10 · 29 March 2006]

The irony of ironies here of course is that Mr Tony Hancock's created character,the one he had built up over ten years on radio and television was in fact a rebel.Not a "rebel" - but a genuine 24/7 "What are you rebelling against?" -" What have you got?"-type rebel.He had a bad word for everybody,he was a Victor Meldrew 30 years before his time. So in the movie "The Rebel",we have a man whose great comic creation was a rebel playing a man who was playing at being a rebel(stick with me,all this rebel stuff will be over in a minute). Eric Midwinter in his fine book on comedians "Make 'em Laugh" likens Hancock to Jimmy Porter,and he is absolutely right.In the comparison of a passage from "A Sunday afternoon at home" with a speech from "Look back in anger",the similarities are obvious. Mr Hancock had all the lower middle class awareness of not actually belonging anywhere.He resents those socially superior to him because he aspires to join them but never can and he resents those socially inferior to him because they also belong to a club he can never join. Mr Sid James and Mr Kenneth Williams represent those enemies. He is ever-so-slightly upmarket in the film,an office worker with a bowler hat rather than an astrakhan coat and a homburg.With absolutely no justification he believes himself to be an artist and takes off to Paris to be discovered.The satire is laid on a bit thick here,the targets a bit obvious,but 45 years later Britart is thriving,which rather proves the point of the movie. A perpetual argument rages over whether Mr Hancock was the first comic genius (arguably the only one) of the TV age or whether he was just a fine comedian blessed with comic writers of genius."The Rebel" does not further that argument one way or the other.What it does do,in my opinion,is show that he needed the smaller parameters of his radio/TV days to restrain him in one sense but to liberate him in another. He is frankly not believable in a Parisian milieu.Within the confines of Railway Cuttings he is ,conversely,freer to explore the true depth of his character. Because his film career was disappointingly short we must seize on "The Rebel"as a chance to see Mr Hancock and some of his favourite cohorts on a big screen in colour and not in fuzzy black and white.Therein lies most of its pleasure for me. One of the last of the great "Windmill" comics,the era and surroundings that enabled Mr Hancock to evolve his persona have long since faded away.TV itself is the only path to TV stardom,which seems a bit sad.