Basil Dearden (1956)
In 1951, T E B Clarke had his biggest success as a screenwriter, with The Lavender Hill Mob, for which he won an Oscar. In 1959, the producer-director team of Michael Relph and Basil Dearden made the worthy racial crime drama, Sapphire. In between, this trio joined forces on Who Done It? One of the last Ealing comedies, this strange film also saw the big-screen debut of Benny Hill. He plays Hugo Dill, an ice-rink sweeper who dreams of becoming a private investigator. The dream immediately comes true when Hugo wins first prize – cash and a bloodhound – in a pulp crime fiction magazine competition. As a sleuth, Hugo turns out to be as daft as he looks. To quote Wikipedia, ‘His confused efforts to solve a crime lead to him becoming entangled in cold war espionage’.
It’s a puzzle how Benny Hill landed the starring role. It’s easy in retrospect to see the film as the fag end of Ealing comedies but the series was hardly in decline at the time Who Done It? was made: its immediate predecessor, released only three months earlier, was The Ladykillers. Benny Hill had worked on stage, radio and television but, on the evidence of his IMDB and Wikipedia entries, without becoming a big name in any medium. Just turned thirty, Hill can hardly have got the part thanks to good or even comically eccentric looks. Yet Charles Barr, in his book, Ealing Studios (1977), describes the picture as ‘a dull slapstick vehicle for Benny Hill’. What’s he like an actor? As Hugo Dill, he’s basically competent but bland and impersonal. The convoluted plot of Who Done It? requires Hugo to get into a succession of disguises. Doing these turns, Benny Hill is much more comfortable and amusing.
Who Done It? is a film of its time in several ways. A key location in the story is the venue for ‘The Radio Show’, an annual event which, for forty years, showcased the British radio industry. There’s an ‘as Himself’ appearance by Jeremy Hawk, a short-lived high-profile television personality of the 1950s. Well-known popular entertainments are in the picture to be laughed at, however. The stars of the Holiday on Ice-type show that opens proceedings have to make fools of themselves; later on and more briefly, the Dagenham Girl Pipers are treated (although gently enough) as a bad joke. The most interesting reflection of contemporary thinking – and anxieties – comes in the Cold War plotting strand of the story. The bungling-nefarious lot that plans to destroy the British way of life, and which Hugo eventually thwarts, are a conspiracy of Eastern Bloc-heads and German scientists (David Kossoff, George Margo, Denis Shaw and Frederick Schiller). There’s a truly bizarre sequence in which the ‘Royal Scientific Study’ of London (with Ernest Thesiger as its president) is given a vivid demonstration of how one of the scientists has devised means of changing the weather – from sun to snow and storm, from summer to winter and back – at the flick of a switch.
The numerous slapstick sequences are always too long and the sort-of love interest element is really weak. This is partly because Belinda Lee isn’t much of an actress but, to be fair to Lee, she’s not helped by the script. Her character, Frankie, is a ‘strong girl’ – a female equivalent of a strongman – but T E B Clarke doesn’t exploit this inventively. (Because Hugo – even though he’s already seen a show of her strength during the ice rink episode – mistakes Frankie for a physically weedy female, she takes a shine to him. I think that’s the idea anyway: it’s hard to see otherwise what Belinda Lee might see in Benny Hill.) The broad acting in Who’s Done It? often makes it enjoyable, though. Garry Marsh is alarmingly apoplectic as the police detective driven to distraction by Hugo Dill. (Charles Barr describes the casting of Marsh as ‘reinforc[ing] the sense of a 20-year throwback to the [George] Formby days’.) Much of the fun comes from spotting people in uncredited parts who went on to better or different things – Arthur Lowe especially but also Terence Alexander, Ronnie Brody, Harold Goodwin, Irene Handl, Glyn Houston and Ewen Solon. Others in the cast, who do get credits, include Peter Bull, Charles Hawtrey and Thorley Waters. The bloodhound is called Fabian: we wait a long time for a joke on this and it’s not worth waiting for (‘I’ve had to leave Fabian in the yard’). IMDB records that the dog is played by Champion Appeline Hector of West Summerland.
27 January 2016
