THE REBEL (1961)

There’s no doubt that The Rebel is the funniest film ever made about modern art, and it remains a shining example of classic British comedy writing. It’s essential viewing for all art enthusiasts, especially those with an irreverent sense of humour who will enjoy quoting its wickedly astute dialogue during gallery visits. So, it’s welcome news that The Rebel, retitled Call Me Genius in the US, is being presented uncut and in its original aspect ratio on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK by StudioCanal. Remastered at 2K from the original film elements, it has never looked or sounded better, although it’s delightfully dated and of its time.

In the late-1950s, Tony Hancock was the highest paid and most recognisable television personality in the UK. He was known as “the comedian who cleared the streets,” for when his seminal sitcom Hancock’s Half Hour (1956-1960) was on, nearly everyone was indoors watching the same show at the same time. He and his writing team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson felt they had gone as far as they could on the domestic small screen. So, the logical next step was to transition to feature film in the hope of reaching an international audience.

Anthony Hancock (Tony Hancock) is already a rebel. We know this by the way he waits on a deserted station platform opposite the throngs of dark-suited, bowler hat wearing businessmen and office clerks. He’s already set himself apart from the crowd so that when the train pulls into the station, he can beat the inevitable rush by boarding the train from the other side and be first to grab a window seat. However, instead of enjoying his cunningly won view, we hear his sardonic internal monologue as he scans his fellow, near identical commuters, questioning the validity of their humdrum lives along with his own. So, we start off with a satirical primer in existential philosophy that will be picked up later in the narrative when he finds himself surrounded by young ‘pale-and-interesting’ artists, all wearing their beatnik uniforms of black berets and turtlenecks.

At the office, he hangs his umbrella so that it slants in the opposite direction to all the others, another rebellious impropriety, noted with weary disdain by his supervisor (John Le Mesurier) who later catches him drawing caricatures of his workmates when he should be book-keeping. Their ensuing conversation degenerates into a rant, revealing Hancock to be at the end of his tether, and very close to a nervous breakdown. So, the supervisor suggests he takes the rest of the day off—a very understanding boss for the day!

Hancock takes advantage of this unexpected extra time at home to work on the sculpture he refers to as “Aphrodite at the Watering Hole”—a huge block of rough-hewn concrete that stands floor-to-ceiling in the sitting room of his small flat. His vigorous hammering draws the unwelcome attention of his stereotypical landlady Mrs Crevatte (Irene Handl). The clever one-liners come thick and fast in the tightly scripted scene and the atmosphere crackles with the friction between the two characters.

Apparently, Hancock disliked how Handl embellished her lines and mispronounced words. Of course, she does so all the more, keeping him on his toes and eliciting some genuine frustration. One wonders if this was instigated by director Robert Day to enliven the interaction. If so, it worked a treat as it’s a joy to behold these two consummate comedians bouncing off one another with line after line that set the benchmark for what’s to follow. It includes one of my favourite exchanges in the whole film: Mrs Crevatte referring to a painting, asks, “What’s this ‘orrible thing?” to which Hancock replies, pompously, “That, is a self-portrait.” The landlady is not impressed, “Who of?” she asks. And when Hancock explains that he’s not a realist painter but an Impressionist she retorts, “Well, it don’t impress me.”

Turns out that his ensuing eviction, after the floor of his flat fails to support his Aphrodite, is just what he needed to spur him on to take his art even more seriously. He boards a ferry to France and joyously throws his bowler and brolly overboard while waving goodbye to the receding white cliffs of Dover. Arriving destitute in Paris, he lucks out and falls in with a young group of struggling artists, a very young Oliver Reed among them.

Paul (Paul Massie) is impressed by Hancock’s off-hand, iconoclastic remarks and invites him to share his garret studio. Paul is an artist on the cusp of recognition and through him Hancock enters the burgeoning arts community of Paris. Paul is passionate but overly serious, the typical starving artist and just one of the archetypes and stereotypes that were Hancock’s stock in trade.

In only his second major role since his breakthrough starring in Hammer’s classic The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960), Paul Massie is excellent as the straight man to Hancock’s deadpan jester. It’s as much Paul’s story as Anthony’s, though he seems to have stepped out of one of the more serious ‘angry young man’ dramas that were trending in British cinema at the time. The rest of the cast are a showcase of more familiar faces from the era with prominent cameos from Dennis Price, playing a pastiche of Salvador Dali’s public persona, and an otherworldly Nanette Newman as one of the spaced-out, black-clad Existentialists.

The challenging artists who broke with tradition by questioning what art was or could be, had been shaking up the status quo since the turn of the century. By the late-1950s several had become household names—Dali, Picasso, Miro, among them—and it’s these that Hancock sets in his satirical sights. He adopts the flamboyant affectations of Dali. His Aphrodite statue echoes the ugly brutalism of Picasso seen in works like his 1909 bust, Head of a Woman, Fernande or his famous 1937 painting of a Weeping Woman. When Hancock’s work is described as being of the “infantile school” it is the turn of Joan Miro and Paul Klee to be lampooned, but in a way that provides an entry point for the uninitiated toward a deeper understanding their art.

When Hancock talks about rooms having a mood that evokes a symbolic colour, he may as well be quoting the theories of the Blue Rider collective and Franz Marc who explored colours as representations of broader concepts in philosophy and politics. The artist attempted to create harmonious compositions using conflicting colours. He saw this as a metaphor for how differing beliefs and opinions should work together in a balanced society instead of creating divisions. And when Hancock defends his paintings to a critic by stating, “all the colours are different shapes,” he’s making overt reference to the theories of Wassily Kandinsky—the artist credited for reinventing abstract art and pushing it into the mainstream in the early 20th-century.

Fittingly, a real artist was brought in to create all the paintings for The Rebel—both the accomplished ‘good’ art of Paul, and the terrible, critically derided ‘bad’ art of Anthony. To achieve this, someone who understood art along with its criticism and context was required. Alistair Grant was a Royal College of Art alumni who would go on to become head of printmaking there and was later awarded a professorship. He’d already worked with the art departments on a handful of film productions so, he understood how the choice of colour and form in his paintings would interact with the camera. In The Rebel, his art was not simply décor relegated to a wall in the background but an integral part of the performance and at the core of much of the visual humour throughout. Some of the ‘genuine’ art seen on the walls of collectors and in galleries were Alistair Grant’s own work, too.

Beyond playing for laughs, the discussion of what makes art good or bad is a central thread. Who gets to say? Is art only good when a critic tells us so? The Rebel highlights the arbitrary and subjective nature of art criticism and sends up the pretentiousness that pervades the art world of the 1960s. Then, the dominant opinion was that the value of art was created by recognised critics and fixed by dealers. Artists had to please both camps before they had a chance of reaching a wider public audience.

Genuine rebel artists, like Marcel Duchamp, were already challenging these preconceptions by producing works that flouted the art markets and gallery systems. Duchamp famously presented readymade items such as a metal bottle rack, a bicycle wheel, and a urinal as sculptural works. They were, of course laughed at, but such works targeted art world hypocrisies because anyone could easily replicate them yet those selected and displayed by an ‘artist’ accrued value when perceived as ‘art’. He claimed that a thing becomes art if an artist intends it to be, but any work of art is only complete when perceived as art by the viewer. The gallerist and critic didn’t feature in his equation.

In The Rebel, the untrained Anthony Hancock enthusiastically believes that what he makes is art. And who has the right to say otherwise? He’s discouraged by critics and snubbed by dealers, but he continues to make his art, undeterred. Whereas Paul—presented as a ‘real artist’—is wounded by critical rejection and gives up. Ultimately, the film champions authenticity in both art and in life.

It seems that this authenticity is something that Tony Hancock sought and valued in his own art, but he sorely felt the burden of scrutiny that fame brought. Reputedly, his coping methods for his paranoid personality and recurring stage fright made him cantankerous and difficult to work with. To help with this, the BBC began pre-recording the Hancock television shows during the 1958 season, which was highly unusual for the time but, fortunately, preserved examples for posterity. It’s said that he enjoyed the bigger budget and extra rehearsal time of feature production, plus the luxury of being able to do several takes of key scenes to ensure perfection. Thus, The Rebel remains a unique showcase of the comedian at the top of his game and the only time we see his screen character in luscious Technicolor, nicely handled by talented cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, who would go on to become better known for Star Wars (1977).

The Rebel also marked a break from his trusted writing team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, with whom Hancock had created his hugely popular eponymous screen character. He’d been working with them on ideas for a follow-up feature but grew increasingly dissatisfied with the material and, feeling they were simply following a well-trodden path, they parted ways. Apparently, they remained on good terms and would team up again a few years later, but many critics and historians see The Rebel as a high in Hancock’s career that was never surpassed. Tony Hancock was nominated for the BAFTA award for ‘Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles’. It would have been his third win, but it finally went to Rita Tushingham for A Taste of Honey (1961). Galton and Simpson immediately moved on to create another legendary UK sitcom with Steptoe and Son (1962-1974). Hancock’s domestic draw ensured that The Rebel was a critical and commercial success in the UK, but its irony and subtleties were lost on the US audience, where it failed to make any notable box office impact and was considered a flop.

UK | 1961 | 105 MINUTES | 1.66:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • FRENCH

Blu-ray Special Features:

• NEW ‘An Irrepressible Streak: Paul Merton on The Rebel’. A biography of Tony Hancock tracks his career from his first performances entertaining the troops as part of the RAF Gang Show during the war. It then critiques Hancock as a groundbreaking comedian, reminding us that he pretty much invented the sitcom as we know it, tracing his legacy through later characters such as Basil Fawlty and David Brent.
• NEW A Definitive Comedian: Diane Morgan on Tony Hancock. A personal appreciation in which she analyses Hancock’s creation of a character who always falls foul of his pomposity, so the audience enjoys his ensuing trials and tribulations while still hoping for him to come through unscathed. She also points out that although he is often described as deadpan, he was a very physical comedian with a truly mobile and expressive face, particularly his eyebrows.
• Commentary with comedian Paul Merton and screenwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. Who better to provide a well-informed and highly informative commentary than the writers, along with one of the many comedians influenced by Hancock, to give a professional perspective on his material and technique? In turn, they discuss those earlier comedians who influenced Hancock, including Sid Field, Will Hay, and Peter Sellers. They recount how the unlikely involvement of Hollywood star George Sanders came about, and then provide production information, mainly focused on the development side, as writers were rarely present during production. They share potted biographies of the cast and crew, including the many interesting bit-players. They also react to and comment on the film itself, and laud its overall quality, its observation, and density of brilliant lines.
• Behind the Scenes Stills Gallery.
• Theatrical trailer.

Cast & Crew

director: Robert Day.
writers: Ray Galton & Alan Simpson (story by Tony Hancock).
starring: Tony Hancock, George Sanders, Paul Massie, Margit Saad, Grégoire Aslan, Dennis Price, Irene Handl, John Le Mesurier, Liz Fraser & Mervyn Johns.