| The Rebel | |
| Director: | Robert Day |
| Producer: | W.A. Whittaker |
| Starring: | Tony Hancock George Sanders Paul Massie Margit Saad |
| Music: | Frank Cordell |
| Cinematography: | Gilbert Taylor |
| Editing: | Richard Best |
| Studio: | Associated British Picture Corporation |
| Distributor: | Warner-Pathé Distributors |
| Runtime: | 105 minutes |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
The Rebel (US title: Call Me Genius) is a 1961 British satirical comedy film directed by Robert Day and starring Tony Hancock.[1] It was written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The film concerns the clash between bourgeois and bohemian cultures.
Tony, a disaffected London office clerk, catches the train to Waterloo Station every morning. Each commuter wears a bowler hat and carries an umbrella. In the City, Tony is one of many identical clerks in a dull office. One day his boss catches him drawing faces instead of working, and he is asked to produce his ledgers, which are full of poor quality caricatures.
Back at his mid-terraced Victorian house lodgings, Tony dons his artist's smock, and resumes work on "Aphrodite at the Waterhole", a horrendous and huge sculpture. His landlady Mrs Crevatte complains about the hammering noise. He explains he cannot afford a model and it represents "women as he sees them". She threatens to evict him if he does not remove the statue. As he remonstrates with his copy of Van Gogh's self-portrait on his wall, the statue crashes through the floor.
At a local cafe he orders a coffee "with no froth". This annoys the owner, who tells Tony he has just bought an expensive froth-making machine. Inspired by a poster on the wall Tony decides to go to Paris. He takes a train to Dover with his Aphrodite on a wagon to the rear; she is decapitated as the train goes through a tunnel. At the port, Tony is furious, but worse is to follow: while being loaded onto a ship it bursts through the bottom of its net and is lost in the sea. On the ferry he throws his bowler hat and umbrella into the sea; unfortunately it is raining heavily when he arrives in France.
In Paris, Tony goes to a cafe in Montmartre and meets a group of English-speaking artists. He befriends Paul, who speaks passionately about art, and invites Tony to share his studio and flat. Tony loves the atmosphere in the studio. He critiques Paul's paintings: "Your colours are the wrong shape", he says.
Paul admires the childlike style of Tony's work: "infantile art". Josey, a red-haired, blue-lipped beatnik visits and invites them to a very large mansion, filled with artwork. Here the Dalí-esque owner, Jim Smith, sleeps on the bookcase because he is writing a book. A group of young people all dressed alike hang on Tony's every word, and think he is fantastic.
Inspired by Jim Smith, Tony sleeps on top of his wardrobe and brings a cow to live in the flat. He tries his first action painting. A disillusioned Paul decides to leave, and gifts Tony his art.
As Tony's reputation spreads he is visited by Sir Charles Broward, an art collector and buyer who notices and is attracted to Paul's work. Sir Charles asks Tony if Paul's works are his and Tony says they were "a gift", which is misinterpreted. Tony's own work is labelled awful. After the first exhibition, he goes to a posh restaurant with Sir Charles and orders egg and chips. When pushed to choose something more, he orders snails, egg and chips, and a cup of tea.
Sir Charles takes Tony to Monte Carlo, where he has dinner with a number of rich guests. One woman, Mrs Carreras, wishes to be painted by Tony. Her husband, after some debate, commissions a sculpture. Tony injures his fingers while hammering, and later at dinner Mrs Carreras hand-feeds him. Carreras offers to buy Tony's entire art collection for £50,000.
On the Carreras' yacht, Tony dresses as a bird for the fancy dress party. Mrs Carreras dresses as a cat. He rejects her advances and she threatens to shoot him. On deck, he unveils the statue to everyone's horror—it is a copy of his Aphrodite—and Mrs Carreras accuses him of assaulting her. The statue drops through the ship and Tony escapes on the yacht's launch. Still dressed as a bird, Tony goes to the airport and says he wants to fly to Britain. "Wouldn't you rather take a plane?" the attendant quips.
He returns to Mrs Crevatte's, finding Paul living with her and working in an office, though still painting as a hobby. Tony persuades Paul to lend him some new paintings, promising to explain later. Showing these paintings at the London exhibition, Tony reveals that Paul is the true artist and "the rubbish" is Tony's work. Leaving Paul to enjoy his newfound fame and fortune, Tony returns to Mrs Crevatte's and resumes work on his Aphrodite - with Mrs Crevatte as the model.
The film was made by Associated British Picture Corporation and distributed by Warner-Pathé (ABPC's distribution arm).
The Rebel attempts to transfer Hancock's radio and television comedy persona to the big screen, and several regular supporting cast members of Hancock's Half Hour also appeared, including John Le Mesurier, Liz Fraser and Mario Fabrizi. The since-demolished railway station used at the beginning of the film, was Bingham Road in the Croydon suburb of Addiscombe, named Fortune Green South for the film.
The theme of railway station commuters' regimentation and dress codes had been depicted before: in his 1898 work The Return, Conrad wrote: 'their backs appeared alike-almost as if they had been wearing a uniform'. Hancock told the identically-dressed existentialists that before becoming one himself, he'd worn a uniform as a commuter.Also in 1952's Something Money Can't Buy, during Anthony Steel's daydreaming reverie sequence, working at the local government office.
In The Rebel, existentialist themes are explored by mocking Parisian intellectual life and portraying the pretensions of the English middle class. Galton and Simpson had previously satirised pseudo-intellectuals in the Hancock's Half Hour radio episode "The Poetry Society" (1959), in which Hancock attempts to imitate the style of the pretentious poets and fails, and is infuriated when his idiot friend Bill does the same and wins their enthusiastic approval.
The film also includes scenes parodying modern art. The scene showing Hancock splashing paint onto a canvas and riding a bike over it is a lampoon of the work of Action Painter William Green, while the childlike paintings of Hancock, referred to as the 'infantile school' or the 'shapeist school', parody the naive style.
In 2002, the London Institute of 'Pataphysics organised an exhibition consisting of recreations of all the art works seen in the film.[2] There is still dispute whether the drawings and paintings, attributed to Hancock and his roommate, were all produced by the same artist, Alistair Grant (1925 - 1997).[3] or whether Hancock's poor quality 'Infantilist School' artworks were actually produced as a joke by the British modernist painter, John Bratby.[4]
The Rebels British premiere was at the Plaza Cinema in London's West End on 2 March 1961, following a screening at the Beirut Film Festival.[5]
According to the Motion Picture Herald, the film was the 6th most popular movie at the UK box office in 1961.
An anonymous reviewer (most likely Dudley Carew) in The Times, at the time of the film's British release, said Hancock had "made the transition from small to large screen" in this film "with gratifying success".[6]
On its release in the US, under the title Call Me Genius (retitled as there was an existing TV series with the same name), the film was not well received. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times wrote: "Norman Wisdom can move over. The British have found a low comedian who is every bit as low as he is and even less comical". He thought it was derivative.[7]
A reviewer writing for the British Film Institute's Screenonline website commented: "In this film, comic rebellion places artists as the antithesis of workers and there is a kind of lazy shorthand at work that conflates artists with Paris, existentialism, angry young men, beatniks and beat poets. Cod philosophical discussions of what art is about permeate the film, but this reflects the times accurately".[8]
Galton and Simpson wrote in January 2012 that the best review they ever received was from artist Lucian Freud who reportedly described it as the best film made about modern art.[9]
Hancock was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles in 1962.
On Mrs. Crevatte seeing one of Hancock's pictures on the wall:
On Mrs. Crevatte first encountering Hancock's Aphrodite at the Waterhole
The abstract expressionist painting scene:
A definition of Existentialism
As he takes his leave of the Paris Art World at his final exhibition:
Using new high definition transfer the film was released on DVD in 2019 by Network Distributing Limited.[10]
Concurrent with the opening of the film, May Fair Books released a paperback novelization of the screenplay. By-lined "Alan Holmes" was a pseudonym for Piccadilly Western novelist Gordon Landsborough.