Street theatre... The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963), BFI London After Dark Season

Even now with chunks of real estate sacrificed to the “progress” of Crossrail and corporate encroachment, Soho is still the place to be in London’s West End. My first decade in London was dominated by evenings in the French House, Coach & Horses and Soho Brasserie leading off to subterranean clubs, rare grooves and, yes, even the Groucho, before a pick me up at the Bar Italia and the night bus home. It has always been an area defined by an adventurous edge amidst the drab erotica – a place where the capital is not quite in control, commercially or morally.

Back before my time, in the early Sixties, Soho was in transition with its multi-cultural shopping streets gradually being marked with clip joints and increasingly brazen strip clubs. It’s a demimonde sensationally captured in Beat Girl and Espresso Bongo yet whilst Sammy Lee is part of this loose sub-genre of Soho films it's also far more aligned with the social realist films of the period and British noir. Which is exactly why Edgar Wright has included it in this season of London films that influenced his Last Night in Soho.

Even more than those earlier films, The Small World of Sammy Lee, uses real Soho locations – including a glimpse of the famed 2i’s Club in which so many folk and rock stars began – along with real strippers, albeit in the fictional Peep Show club built on a Pinewood backlot. It also has easily the most gripping and believable narrative as the titular Sammy (a truly fantastic performance from Anthony Newley) strives to pay his dues in order to avoid a heavy beating and disfigurement.

I’ve only ever seen this film on the small screen and watching it again I could identify nearly every street as Sammy’s search for cash takes him up Berwick Street, through Old Compton Street, down Gerrard Street and by cab over to Whitechapel and even Victoria Coach Station in its pomp… a place of low-budget, comings and goings. It’s a breathless travelogue north and south of Shaftsbury Avenue as well as a tribute to the communities of retailers and, yes, even adult entertainers, just about getting by.

Towards the end, Sammy’s ready to stop his perfunctory stand-up and turns on his audience in a way they don’t understand… there’s no “love” in the Peep Show Club and there’s certainly no actual sex, just a fantasy presented to an audience of sad men by a group of women who “hate their guts”. But it’s not just the women who are stuck… everyone is looking for something they don’t have, the girls, even the club’s owner, Sammy and his sweetheart, Patsy. What will it take to break away?

Sammy 'Lee' Leeman is a compere at the Peep Show Club (located in a basement in Gerrard Street according to the essential Reel Streets) and chief amongst his many weaknesses is his predilection for gambling. The film opens following a spectacularly unsuccessful all-night session that leaves him £300 in debt to one of the gangsters running the area, the unseen but ever-present, “Connor”.

Not so sharp with the cards...

Making his way to the club, he finds that Patsy played by Julia Foster simply one of my favourite actors and if you want to see her in excelsis, seek out Mr Axelford’s Angel – I have a spare copy should anyone want it! The two had enjoyed a brief romance when Sammy was playing the Northern circuit and the 18-year-old has left home and made her way down South to find him. Patsy is young an innocent but tough enough to subject herself to topless inspection by the club’s maniacally hard-chewing manager Gerry Sullivan (Robert Stephens), whose eyes pop in appreciation. Stephens is always great value and one of my regrets is not seeing his Lear although I did once spend an afternoon with him being beery in a pub just off Primrose Hill.

 

Even on the Pinewood soundstage, the Peep Show is drab and depressing yet Sammy has an energy that belies his circumstances but you get the feeling that he’s running on empty. He’s perpetual motion but hardly unstoppable as the arrival of two of Mr Connors’ heavies in his dressing room is about to prove. They’re quite the couple, old hand Fred (Kenneth J. Warren), who has his own inscrutable sense of decency and the excitable young apprentice, Johnny (Clive Colin-Bowler). Not quite John Hurt and Tim Roth in The Hit but there’s something about Sammy that touches Fred and he decides to give Sammy a chance… five hours to get all the money, in cash and avoid the consequences. So begins the chase of Sammy’s life.

(Should be) Dame Julia Foster

His first thought is to try the easy route and he cabs it over to Whitechapel and his brother Lou (Warren Mitchell) who runs a delicatessen with long-suffering wife Milly (Miriam Karlin). Pleasantries quickly aside Lou might just lend Sammy the money until Milly intervenes… Perhaps it would be good for Sammy to work this one out for himself she suggests, the guilt of a previous fling hanging over the two in Lou’s oblivious presence.

Maybe it is Sammy’s time to stand up and start counting… with the aid of his slightly befuddled sidekick Harry (Wilfrid Brambell) and in between shifts introducing the dancers at the Peep, he racks up the invention to try and raise the cash. He flogs some dodgy watches, gets glasses for a new club – run by an exasperated Roy Kinnear and a fey Derek Nimmo (harder than he looks, he went to school with my Dad in Liverpool) -  and pays off one creditor against another.

Running heroically through the Soho streets, Sammy is in full flow, as if it’s more than his life that depends on it… He gets a tip from a shady pal, and goes off to retail some grass, offending his hip black mate rehearsing his jazz in a basement before finding a supplier: some films wouldn’t take the time to pop popular perceptions in this way but, like Sammy himself, this narrative cares to cover a lot of ground.

Meanwhile Patsy has been persuaded to do a turn by sleazy Gerry and Sammy ends up decking him and getting the sack. Julia Foster insisted on doing the routine herself – having been played by Hughes whose stand in for her was rather heavier, persuading her that she had no alternative but to put her best foot forward. It is an uncomfortable watch – the actress was just 20 and in her first major role even if it adds to our recognition of Sammy’s own disgust: Patsy’s not the kind of girl he wants dragged down in his world and she’s an important part of this day when his small world not only gets turned upside down but he develops a sense of moral responsibility.          

No spoilers…

Time clicks on and Sammy’s almost within reach of his total; today is the time for stick or twist, run or stay and the fear of Frank’s fists grows with every passing minute…What’ll it be Sammy Lee?

Ken Hughes directs his own script with focus, maintaining the flow even with so moany stop off points along Sammy’s five-hour dash. He also wasn’t averse to using a few tricks or two to bring out the best in his cast with Foster saying recently that he’d told her later that he’d deliberately set out to make her feel vulnerable throughout the shoot. Cameraman, Wolfgang Suschitzky came from a documentary background and he captures London in such a forensic way this film is surely one of the best records of the era. There’s also a fab score composed by Kenny Graham and the soundtrack is available, of course, from Trunk Records.

Johnny and Fred pay Sammy a visit

Sammy Lee is on Blu-ray with extras including an interview with Julia Foster, Mike Hodges – influenced by the film on Get Carter – and a location guide to help you spot those landmarks, streets and atmospheres that persist even as they slowly fade away…

You can buy it from the BFI shop online.

There was also a fab short, Look at Life: In Gear (1967) which took us down Kings Road and Carnaby Street in search of Swinging London. Michael Ingrams’ sardonic commentary tells us that we’ll be missing the point if we take it too seriously but we do get to see inside Granny Takes a Trip, Hung on You, The Antique Supermarket, I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet – for your genuine ex-military braided jackets - Biba… clubs like Tiles, The Bag ‘o Nails and other venues were Syd’s Floyd, Jimi and The Soft Machine could be found! Ingrams takes his tongue out of his cheek long enough to point out that these shops were breaking the mould and inventing their own fashions, in that sense independent Britain maybe still swings here and there…

Rupert Court with the Blue Posts in the background, that and the one in Berwick Street are still open.

Here's Stanley! A Clockwork Orange (1971), BFI UK-wide re-release from 5th April

It’s hard to believe that this film is almost fifty year’s old, it’s such uncomfortable viewing with a very modern nihilism and, being made in Britain’s pre-EU “golden age”, it does a good job of presenting the type of moral vacuum that drives us now to be “free”. Do as thy wilt shall be the whole of the law and one man’s freedom is another’s licence: a free trade in human compassion that sees the weakest abused. We are now in the time of going backwards and the warnings of the film stand out starker than ever they did.

As Kubrick said of his film it is not only social (and moral) satire but a “running lecture on free-will” for if society’s cure for anti-social behaviour and criminality is brutal brainwashing and chemically-fired aversion therapy then how far have we lost the will to reason? And is this brutal “project of fear” just an admission of failure in the matter of producing a society capable of reasoning and reaching moral judgements?

So, the BFI’s decision to re-release this once-forbidden film (apart from the censors, Kubrick stopped it being screened until his death, so exhausted was he by the reactionary and, largely unthinking reaction to his work…) couldn’t be better timed. From Friday 5^th April it will be playing at 200 cinemas across this septic isle and God help us…

A Clockwork Orange is as comic and brutal as its concrete backdrops but amidst the theatre of the absurd book-ending the imprisonment and “rehabilitation” of Alex, it poses the questions that hit hardest. Burgess ’62, Kubrick ’71… Trump, Brexit… we are all Alex now.

Malcolm McDowell gives one of his most complex and disturbing performances as Alex DeLarge, the boy from Burscough, adopting a strange generic northern accent which makes his love of violence and Ludwig van Beethoven somehow all the more shocking. He leads a gang of “droogs” – Pete (Michael Tarn), Georgie (James Marcus) and Dim (a young and perfectly-cast Warren Clarke). The language is Nadsat, a slang invented by Burgess involving of Slavic (especially Russian), English, and Cockney rhyming slang.

He lives at home with his folks but in the first blistering and unsettling sequence we see what they get up to on a typical night out… Back as my boyhood turned to early youth there was always a specific culture of violence in British society: bovver boys, skins, lads wandering round in light blue “parallels” and feather cuts… a glam-rocker link between well-dressed mods and later footie casuals who favoured designer labels as part of their aggressive signalling. These were all gangs you’d cross the road for and at the very least avert your gaze.

Malcolm McDowell, my Dad knew his dad...

Alex’s gang evening starts off with a vicious attack on a tramp – kicks for kicks and mindless too. Next up they interrupt another gang raping a young woman (Shirley Jaffe) in an abandoned theatre/cinema – a degenerate “show” – and attack the other gang not to rescue the girl but just because they can. Celebrating victory in a comically back-projected, Wacky Races car drive they end up at the home of a writer Mr. Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee) and his wife Mary (Adrienne Corri).

They con their way in and soon reveal their attitude to women and the “in and out” by brutally raping Mary whilst kicking Frank around on the floor. Alex belts out “Singing in the Rain” as if to illustrate the fact that this gruesome act means absolutely nothing to him…

The film’s influence on pop culture is clear throughout: the boys drink in the Korova Milk Bar (later the name of the Bunnymen’s record label) and drink Moloko cocktails (later the name of a post-acidhouse dance-pop band) and Alex goes record shopping with a band called Heaven 17 at number 3 in the charts. The record shop was the Chelsea Drugstore and it has a copy of the 2001 soundtrack prominently displayed… naturally. Alex meets a couple of young women Sonietta (Gillian Hills a proper French pop star as well as having featured in Antonioni’s Blow Up and being the teenage riot herself in Beat Girl) and her pal (Barbara Scott) and the three enjoy a famously hi-speed threesome back in Alex’s bedroom: a reference to Hills, Hemmingway and Birkin in Blow Up?

Gillian Hills spots Heaven 17 high in the charts!

In spite of their successful freewheeling horror show there are divisions in the gang and Alex’s leadership of Dim and Pete is growing weaker. The two challenge him and Alex humiliates them but the resentment only grows… After a disastrous raid on another wealthy household in which Alex accidentally kills a woman referred to only as Catlady (Miriam Karlin - a powerhouse cameo mixing yoga and physical violence) with a large porcelain phallus… the boys beat him up and leave him to be arrested.

Society takes its revenge and Alex is imprisoned and after a few years inside cultivating religion and the favour of the prison chaplain, he jumps at the chance to undertake a new treatment which aims to “cure” criminals so they can safely be returned to society without the ongoing costs of imprisonment… But it’s not a let off and the process involves aversion therapy of the most unrelentingly brutal kind as – eyelids forced open – Alex is forced to watch hour after hour of horrific images until, literally, violence, sex and evil make him sick.

Will his liberty be worth the loss of his emotional freedom?

In truth there’s too much narrative detail to accurately summarise the film; you could spend paragraphs on Alex’s trip to the record shop and subsequent high-speed threesome. But this film remains controversial because of its high level of content some of it I find hard to accept more particularly the violence towards women all of whom are attractive and displayed nude’… I think Kubrick goes too far, you don’t have to be so graphic.

At the time Kubrick was blamed for so-called copycat violence and ended up pulling the film after he and his family were threatened with an attack on their home aimed at replicating the film’s domestic invasion, assault and rape. It was too much and the film wasn’t screened again in the UK until after the director’s passing in 1999.

Every boy needs a hobby and a pet they can relate to...

A Clockwork Orange is unpleasant but essential watching for anyone serious about film and its socio-political context; almost half a century on it’s still in your face, challenging the watcher to examine their own reactions and to stay watchful. That is hard core and nothing has even come close in popular culture until the dawn of the social media troll… Threats were more serious in the seventies perhaps or maybe we’re just more used to the de-civilising impact of technology.

The Moog music score of Walter, later Wendy, Carlos remains unsettling too:  a “tomorrow’s world” of sound that now signals a parallel universe of the musical future.

The film opens on 5^th April at the BFI and there’s a full listing of where to see it across the UK on the BFI website: it’s unmissable but it comes with consequences. Malcolm McDowell will also be present for a post-screening Q&A and in conversation on 5th.

The film also heralds a Kubrick season and I'm especially looking forward to the hopefully more genteel Barry Lyndon! Full details on the BFI site here.

Salvation in Soho? The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963)

Even now with chunks of real estate sacrificed to the “progress” of Crossrail and corporate encroachments, Soho is still the place to be in London’s West End. From my first excursions down from Liverpool on school trips, to eighties evenings in the French House, Coach & Horses and Soho Brasserie leading off to subterranean clubs, rare grooves and even the Groucho, it has always been an edgy area defined by an adventurous cool amidst the drab erotica – an area where the capital is not quite in control and strange, illicit events may still occur.

Back in the early Sixties, Soho was in transition with its multi-cultural shopping streets gradually being marked with clip joints and increasingly-brazen strip clubs. It’s a demimonde sensationally captured in Beat Girl and even Espresso Bongo and it is not too much of a stretch to view this far less well known film as the third part of this loose Soho-Trilogy.

As with those films, The Small World of Sammy Lee, uses real locations – including a glimpse of the famed 2i’s Club in which so many folk and rock stars began – along with real strippers, albeit in the fictional Peep Show club built on a Pinewood backlot. It also has perhaps the most gripping and believable narrative as the titular Sammy (a fantastic performance from Anthony Newley) strives to pay his dues in order to avoid a heavy beating and disfigurement.

Sammy 'Lee' Leeman is a compere at the Peep Show Club and chief amongst his many weaknesses is his predilection for gambling.  The film opens following a spectacularly unsuccessful all-night session that leaves him £500 in debt to one of the gangsters running the area, the unseen “Connor”.

Sammy later sees another one of Connor’s customers who has had his face slashed for late payment, it can only mean one thing and he has no option but to try and talk his way out of it.

The sweetest girl in all the world…

Making his way to the Peep Show where he works, he finds that Patsy (Julia Foster – the sweetest girl in all the world…) who he had briefly romanced, has made her way down South to find him. Patsy is young an innocent but tough enough to subject herself to topless inspection by the club’s maniacally hard-chewing manager Gerry Sullivan (Robert Stephens a true British legend); whose eyes pop in appreciation.

After that day’s rehearsal, Sammy receives two of Mr Connors’ heavies in his dressing room: the world-weary older hand, Fred (Kenneth J. Warren) and the excitable young apprentice, Johnny (Clive Colin-Bowler). Not quite John Hurt and Tim Roth in The Hit but the more I think about it… they’re cut from the same grimy cloth.

For some reason Fred decides to give Sammy a chance… five hours to get the money and avoid the consequences and so begins the chase of Sammy’s life.

At first he tries the easy route and cabs it over to Whitechapel and his brother Lou (Warren Mitchell) who runs a delicatessen with long-suffering wife Milly (Miriam Karlin). Pleasantries quickly aside Lou might just lend Sammy the money until Milly intervenes… Perhaps it would be good for Sammy to work this one out for himself she suggests, the guilt of a previous fling hanging over the two in Lou’s oblivious presence.

It’s Sammy’s time to stand up and start counting… with the aid of his slightly befuddled sidekick Harry (Wilfrid Brambell) and in between shifts introducing the dancers at the Peep, he racks up the invention to try and raise the cash. He flogs some dodgy watches, gets glasses for a new club – run by an exasperated Roy Kinnear and a fey Derek Nimmo (harder than he looks, he went to school with my Dad in Liverpool!) -  and pays off one creditor against another.

Mr Newley with Wilfrid Brambell

Running heroically through your actual Soho streets, Sammy is in full flow almost as if it’s more than his life that depends on it… He gets a tip from a shady pal, and goes off to retail some grass, offending his hip black mate rehearsing his jazz in a basement before finding a supplier: some films wouldn’t take the time to pop popular perceptions in this way but, like Sammy himself, this narrative cares to cover a lot of ground.

Meanwhile Patsy has been persuaded to do a turn by sleazy Gerry and Sammy ends up decking him and getting the sack. Julia Foster insisted on doing the routine herself and it adds to our recognition of Sammy’s own disgust: Patsy’s not the kind of girl he wants dragged down in his world and she’s an important part of this day when his small world not only gets turned upside down but he develops a sense of moral responsibility.            

No spoilers…

Time clicks on and Sammy’s almost within reach of his total; he has an offer on the antique chair in which his mother used to sit, he’s loathe to sell it but it may be his only hope. He wants to face up to his debtors and yet the chance to flee up North with Patsy also offers him a way out… 

What’ll it be Sammy Lee?

There’s a fab score composed by Kenny Graham and a soundtrack is available from Trunk Records whilst Sammy is available on Blu-ray – all the better to spot those landmarks, streets and atmospheres that even now persist.

You're too late mate, The Blue Posts has just closed down...