I have been working on my own set of commandments for myself, basically just guidelines for how I want to live my life and make choices for which I will be proud. At the moment, one of those is to not allow others to impose goals upon me or to adopt for myself objectives I don’t actually want. I like to think this is how I have almost cleared middle age without having a mid-life crisis. At least there haven’t been any sports cars or inappropriate relations with disproportionately young women.
In 1961 British comedy The Rebel (titled Call Me Genius in the States) has Tony Hancock tiring of the daily grind as a clerk in a stuffy office and heading to Paris, where he hopes the environment will be the soil to fully blossom as an artist. The fertilizer will soon get pretty deep as Hancock’s crap artist is mistaken for being a genius by the cognoscenti.
A truly gifted painter played by Paul Massie kindly shares his loft with Hancock. Bluffing his way through a conversation about art, Hancock has impressed Massie into thinking he’s some sort of genius. He babbles about his new movement of “shapeism” and how he perceives rooms as being a shape and a color. Massie is so frustrated by his own lack of success, and so bewildered by the nonsense spewed by his flatmate, that he starts doubting his own talent. I like this line from him about his attempt to apply meaning to Hancock’s extremely rudimentary paintings: “It’s odd…the childlike quality you bring to your work.”
Soon, a great many other artists are under the spell of Hancock, with him holding court at a full bar. It is astonishing nobody sees through this ruse, as we hear him tell the crowd, “So I says to Dali, ‘Salvatore’, I says…” He even gets an invitation to attend a salon of an existentialist “sect”, something Massie has so desperately wanted to be part of. That scene where we see this group reveals the odd way conservatives of the time regarded anything non-conformist, as there always has to be a yogi in such a scene, for whatever reason. Maybe it was mandated by some UK film union at the time. It is there Hancock tells a group of identically clad and styled bohemians how he had to escape the drudgery of the typical UK office, wherein everybody dresses the same. The assembled gasp in unison.
We had seen him in the daily grind earlier in the picture. The office is like something out of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, a long row of desks, behind each a identical clerk, each pulling the handle of their adding machine in unison. On a wall hang their bowler hats all in a neat row, except one hung in the opposite direction as the rest. Office manager John Le Mesuier corrects this and shoots a glance at Hancock, eyebrows raised.
Mesuier summons the man into his office, as they need to discuss his accounts. He is especially displeased by a large and grandiose “S” Hancock has put on one invoice. The artist tries to explain it is an illuminated letter and he is informed he is employed by an accounting firm and not a monastic order. Then there is talk of time and motion studies, which also seems to be an obligatory component of UK comedies of this period. Altogether, I was wondering if this was going to turn into Bartleby. Doesn’t Mesuier know all he has to say to get out of work is by mumbling, “I’d prefer…not to”?
Back at his apartment after work, Hancock will find even less appreciation for his art from landlady Irene Handl. He tells her one of his paintings is a self-portrait and she asks who it’s of. When he tells her he is an Impressionist, she replies, “Well, it don’t impress me!” There’s one bit I especially like where she pronounces miscellaneous as “miss-kell-ae-knee-us”. Then a horrendous statue he has been carving out of a giant rock drops through the floor and he gets evicted. This bit brought to mind 1958’s Alec Guiness comedy The Horse’s Mouth. Also, I wondered how Hancock got the rock into his bedroom in the first place, and it looks to be significantly larger than any entrance into the room.
And so it is off to France, starting with a journey by train wherein his statue fails to clear a low bridge and it is cleanly decapitated. Perhaps that is the reason for this unusual credit in the opening titles: “The producers wish to acknowledge the fullest co-operation accorded—somewhat apprehensively—by British Railways.”
It is interesting, yet lamentable, to see Hancock begin the film as such a pitiable character only to easily make the transition into a boor who has deluded himself into believing the unearned claims of his genius. At a beatnik get-together, he even repeats things Massie has told him, and everybody assumes Hancock must have been the originator and Massie the imitator.
To his credit, Massie never seems to be envious of Hancock—only baffled by the other man’s success through works that are clearly subpar. Deciding he doesn’t have what it takes, he packs it in, returning to England to become the kind of office drone Hancock used to be: “Nobody’s interested in my kind of painting. It’s got nothing to say.” It is odd that he simply assumes the life Hancock left behind, living in the same room rented by Handl and working for the same employer. I wonder if he continued Hancock’s work of drawing illuminated letters on statements.
Too bad Massie didn’t stick around long enough for George Sanders to appear, as this art connoisseur has been in Paris buying up art. We first see him in a gallery, acquiring some old masterpiece for a Texan oil baron looking for something to hang over his barbeque. Word of mouth brings Sanders to Massie’s old flat, which is now solely occupied by Hancock. Sanders incorrectly assumes the works Massie has left behind are the other man’s output.
To Hancock’s credit, he tries desperately to tell Sanders those paintings aren’t his, and that the others in the room which are his and the ones Sanders hates so much that he demands they be incinerated. However, he doesn’t struggle enough and, when he quickly and completely acquiesces, he accepts his newfound fame as something he deserves. Soon, he is behaving like a complete boor. I will admit this is a realistic trajectory many people would take under the same circumstances, but his character simply becomes less interesting, bar the moments where he still tries to introduce one of his own works as a new piece. He is consistently shut down by Sanders.
If there is a lesson to be taken away from The Rebel, it is that, if Hancock had stuck to his guns, he wouldn’t find himself in an increasingly dire situation where he is waiting to be exposed as a fraud. Then again, without this aspect of the plot, you wouldn’t have him doing a ridiculous “action” painting wherein he throws buckets of paint onto a giant white tarp, then gliding across it like he’s on ice skates. He even rides a bicycle around on it.
That attempt to work within the boundaries placed on him by other artists is similar to what happened to the real-life Hancock when he chose to make this movie. Though intended to break him wide open in America, the film stiffed. He may have stretched himself too far, and compromised his following in the UK, but I feel he made a very enjoyable picture, one with comments on the art world which still ring true today.
Dir: Robert Day
Starring: Tony Hancock, George Sanders, Paul Massie
Watched on StudioCanal UK blu-ray (region B)