Picturenose

Fancy a ride? (Fnarr, fnarr)

The news of the imminent demise of the FX4 London black cab has been knee-jerkingly interpreted as another assault on ‘good old’ Britishness, a Fine Fare plastic bag of a nation’s fictitious and flawed autobiographical memory, formed of such relics as the Blitz, roast beef and Yorkshire pud, 1966 etc. And of course, Carry On movies. All of these retain a whiff of class, of a chippy prole culture wallowing in its own (fictional) salt-of-the-earthiness, a denial of sensuality and pleasure and learning for its own sake because unaffordable.

Gerald Thomas’s Carry On movies wore this squalor like a dirty mac – at least from circa 1968 onwards, where not even Talbot Rothwell’s Grade One-listed puns and fnarr-fnarr funnies could divert from the horrendous cheapness of it all.

This is often seen as a bizarre choice – Carry On Cleo (1964), Carry On Spying (1964) and Carry On… Up the Khyber (1968) are a banquet of belly-laughs - but Carry On Cabby (1963) is probably, film-wise, the series’ stand-out in terms of stylistic integrity and film-making skill. It comes the closest of the lot to shaping a filmic poetry of the petit-bourgeois milieu the film’s producers aimed at.

Charlie Hawkins (Sid James) runs Speedee Cabs, a traditional Black Cab franchise, in the outer London suburbs (probably near Bray Studios, but let that pass). His employees aren’t quite the usual cut-outs – long-suffering trusty at the radio mike controlling the cars, bolshie shop steward and idiot new boy – the memorable Pintpot, with Charles Hawtrey at his campest in motorcycle leathers (honest). Then backstairs there’s Hattie Jacques as Peg, Sid’s neglected wife, who, in concert with Liz Fraser (Sally, a Speedee Cabs paper-pusher) sets up a rival firm, Glamcabs, to undermine Speedy and win Sid back to half-forgotten domestic bliss. Cue leggy lovelies – Amanda Barrie among them – driving Ford Consuls and fiddling with compacts. Hattie even adopts an alter ego, Mrs Glam, part-transport manager, part-madam. Sid instructs an interception of Glamcabs’ wavelength – to no avail. Until two small-time desperadoes hijack Peg and Sally on the way to bank their mountainous takings (oo-er!) – then Charlie, finally and symbolically tuning into Peg, understands the situation and in a bravura piece of beautifully-paced, superbly-choreographed film-making which anticipated The Italian Job (1969) by some years, marshals his fleet of cabs by mike to cut off the villains’ escape. ‘Blimey!’ splutters Peter Gilmore as one of the thugs, ‘there’s ‘undreds of ‘em!’

The beauty of the sequence is the sedateness of the veteran cabs in formation slowly, lumberingly penning in a fast car, subverting all received car-chase ideas. It’s Talbot Rothwell’s first Carry On script, so the pun-count is high, but so is the quality of cinematography, from interiors of Bakelite phones and filing cabinets to deserted misty roads in New Town housing estates, of a Britain slowly rousing itself from the hangover of war. It is not glamorous or sensual or pleasure-seeking – but, in a distant, subconscious echo of Truffaut, di Sica and Renoir, it harmonizes the quotidian into something worth celebrating, however drab the colours or lack of same. Just with Finbarr Saunders gags chucked in.

It has nothing to do with defiant lumpen-proletarianism, and everything to do with shaking a bit of magic woofle dust over everyday life of the poor struggling sods of the poetry of Larkin and Eliot and turning it into a little bit of fantasy.

Thus to call this trifle a neo-realist film is silly – but in a century’s time, no other Carry On film will stand up among the great British comedy movies of the 1960s, alongside Help! (1965), A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Tony Hancock’s The Punch and Judy Man (1963) and Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966). It’s not just a period treat, it’s a charm full stop. Hail it from the past and take a ride - it’s worth the fare.

91 mins.