julian_craster

Unfunny, peculiar
They're great on TV. But when British comedians get to make feature films,
they generally make turkeys. Even a genius like Peter Cook was not spared,
says William Cook


The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer
Saturday June 30, 2007
The Guardian
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2113831,00.html

The timing could hardly be better. In the week that Tony Blair steps down,
after 10 years in 10 Downing Street, the film that foresaw his PR-friendly
style of government is finally released on DVD. The story of a slick and
soulless spin doctor who becomes the people's prime minister, The Rise &
Rise Of Michael Rimmer is a cinematic rarity - an intelligent and
thought-provoking satire. Maybe that's why it's such a spectacular turkey.

Every movie anorak has their favourite turkey. The Rise & Rise Of Michael
Rimmer is mine. Anyone can make a bad film (and a lot of bad film-makers
have succeeded) but to make a turkey requires talent and finesse. A true
turkey is a heroic failure, a film that almost achieves greatness, only to
falter at the final hurdle and topple over into farce. Turkeys don't just
damage reputations - they destroy them - yet history is often kind to them.
Unlike mediocre films, they usually improve with age. The Rise & Rise Of
Michael Rimmer is a perfect example of this genre. Like all prize turkeys,
it had all the ingredients of a great movie, including the participation of
one of Britain's greatest comedians, Peter Cook.
By common consent, Peter Cook was one of the funniest men who ever lived -
the driving force behind Beyond The Fringe, the saviour of Private Eye, and
the best half of Britain's best double act, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
Ever since Cook became a star, at the beginning of the 1960s, film producers
had been queuing up to offer him leading roles, but none of them had
succeeded in capturing his strange wit. He was touted as the next Cary
Grant. And then along came Michael Rimmer, and Cook's film career imploded.

Watching Michael Rimmer today, what's most astonishing is its extraordinary
powers of prophecy. Admittedly, the specifics of the story were pure fantasy
(to the best of my knowledge, no British MP has ever murdered the Prime
Minister by pushing him off a North Sea oil rig) but the generalities were
spot on. Devised by David Frost, and written by Cook, John Cleese and Graham
Chapman, Rimmer anticipated the absurdity of "interactive" politics, and the
inevitable triumph of style over substance as politicians learnt to control
TV. In another uncanny premonition of modern politics, any policy
differences between Labour and the Conservatives are virtually non-existent.
Rimmer's party allegiances are irrelevant. His only real interest is power.

With appearances by bright young things like Cleese and Chapman, plus old
troopers like Arthur Lowe and Denholm Elliott, The Rise & Rise Of Michael
Rimmer could hardly have had a better pedigree. It even boasted a cameo by
Harold Pinter. So where did it all go wrong? Well, delaying its release
until after the general election hardly helped. Rimmer successfully
predicted the Tories' surprise victory in 1970, but although the film was
ready for release in 1969, the studio postponed it for a year, lest it
became a source of controversy during the election campaign. As the late
Harry Thompson put it, in his fine biography of Cook, "the whole point of
the film was to predict the course of the election, but studio heads have
often been and often will be morons." But the main problem was Rimmer,
played by Peter Cook.

In The Rise & Rise Of Michael Rimmer, Cook's acting was as wooden as a
flat-pack wardrobe, as he subsequently admitted in a typically self-effacing
interview. "I was suffering from Cook's disease, which involves that
terrible glassy-eyed look," he confessed. "I belong to the school of acting
which consists of doing nothing in particular. The variety of my expressions
between shock, joy and terror are very hard to define." Cook was funny when
he was sending himself up, but he had no opportunity to do so in this car
crash of a movie. As with a car crash it's hard to avert your gaze.

As John Cleese pointed out, Cook was never a very good actor. He was great
at playing comic archetypes, from upper-class twits to working-class
misfits. This was perfect for short sketches, but when he was required to
portray real emotion he quickly came unstuck. Cook sleepwalks through this
film like a man in a hypnotic trance. His acting is so stilted that it goes
beyond bad and almost comes out the other end as modern art - almost, but
not quite.

Cook's film career never recovered. He got one more shot at a leading role,
playing Sherlock Holmes in a remake of The Hound Of The Baskervilles, with
Dudley Moore as Dr Watson. It sounded like a great idea, but the result was
even worse than Michael Rimmer. Barry Took described it as one of the worst
films ever made. Yet while Cook sank into a succession of humdrum cameos in
humdrum movies, Moore - a lovable buffoon with a fraction of Cook's comic
talent - became a huge Hollywood star in Arthur and 10.

If Peter Cook was the only great comic who ever made an awful movie, then
The Rise & Rise Of Michael Rimmer would be just another footnote in the
piss-poor history of British cinema. However Cook's failure to master the
big screen isn't the exception - it's the rule. Generally, the better the
comic, the worse their movies. Have you ever seen any of Tony Hancock's
films? Or Eric Morecambe's? Lenny Henry is a superb stand-up, character
comic and mimic. True to form, his movie, True Identity, is gobsmackingly
bad. "I made a Hollywood film which we won't mention," he told Clive
Anderson, "currently in the bargain bin of your local video shop."

The easy answer to this conundrum is that comedians are lost without a live
audience, yet Americans don't seem to suffer from the same malaise. From Bob
Hope to Woody Allen, US comics have always found it easy to make the jump
from stand-up to cinema. Even Richard Pryor made a few decent films. No, the
real reason why British comics make such bad movies is that the British
sense of humour is all about refusing to take ourselves seriously. And in
the end, movie-making is bound to be a serious business. There's simply too
much money involved for it to be anything else. It's no coincidence that the
few British comics who've conquered Hollywood have done it playing
foreigners (like Peter Sellers, or Sacha Baron Cohen with Borat) or idiots
(like Stan Laurel, or Rowan Atkinson with Mr Bean). If we play ourselves
Hollywood doesn't get the joke, and when we make our own films the humour
usually still falls flat. Like Peter Cook, Britain's best comics are
destined to be heroic failures.


OTHER DUDS....

The Punch and Judy Man
Tony Hancock

Hancock could be wonderfully funny - but only when Ray Galton and Alan
Simpson wrote the scripts. In The Punch & Judy Man he stars in a melancholy
paean to the English seaside. The result is one of the most depressing
movies ever made. Hancock committed suicide five years later. His diehard
devotees insist the film is a masterpiece, but even Hancock's biggest fans
admit that this glum film is awfully short of laughs.




True Identity
Lenny Henry

Henry plays an African-American actor who whites up as an Italian American
to escape the Mob (and ends up looking a lot like Jackie Mason) in a movie
that makes Ebony & Ivory sound like a protest song. "I've learnt some really
important lessons from the stuff we've been going through," he says.
"There's black, there's white and there's meaningful shades of grey." Er,
yes, Lenny. Warning: this film contains Shakespearean soliloquys.




The Magnificent Two
Morecombe & Wise

The terrible two, more like. Eric and Ernie play a pair of travelling
salesmen who arrive in a Latin American dictatorship in the middle of a
bloodthirsty civil war. Part slapstick, part shoot 'em up, like Woody
Allen's Bananas - but with far fewer punchlines. "If we had Neil Simon
writing for us and Billy Wilder directing, I know we could be international
stars," said Eric, plaintively. Sadly, Simon and Wilder never took the bait.
Released in Canada as What Happened At Campo Grande. What indeed?

The Rise & Rise Of Michael Rimmer is out now on DVD

GRAEME

I finally got to see this quite recently. I wouldn't say it was awful - just not as wildly funny as it thinks it is. Beyond that, it is actually utterly fascinating as a slice of satirical vision.

I enjoyed the prime minister's state visit to the US president, where he has to keep shifting up seats in an endless waiting-room like corridor and then finally gets in to see the bloke for about 30 seconds.

It is weirdly prescient in many ways about the media dictated politics we have now - I guess the writers would be appalled at how accurate they were.

The cast is excellent - especially Arthur Lowe. How strange to see Harold Pinter as a TV presenter.

But it is poor comedy. And it all falls rather flat at the end. It is in the shadow of Lindsey Anderson and Kubrick in terms of anarchic vision of the times - and it is no Bedazzled in terms of Peter Cook greatness.