Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.   

                               THE FLIES CRAWLED UP THE WINDOW

 

            This, dear reader, is going to be one of my vague and evocative meditations upon the past and how we react to it. But fear not. I am not delving into the very deep historical past. I am delving only into a piece of cheerful vulgarity from early in the 20^th century and I am going to, as I have so often done on this blog, express bemusement at how the tastes of the relatively recent past are so different from the tastes of today. Not being the sort of person who feels superior to people of the past, I am not going to belittle their defunct tastes. I know that before too long, the tastes of today will smell like mouldy cheese. I am simply going to express my bemusement.

            Are you sitting comfortably?

Right. Here goes.

It happened like this. Some weeks ago, for no particular reason, the song “The Flies Crawled Up the Window” popped into my head. If you are younger than me, I might have to explain what that song was. It was a cheerful and nonsensical music-hall-type song recorded in the early 1930s, thus

“The flies crawled up the window

They had nothing else to do

They went up in their thousands

And came down two by two”.

And so on for five or six more equally witty verses.

Why, pray tell, did I come to know this song which was recorded two decades before I was born?

Because it was often played on radio when I was a child in the 1950s. And there was something odd about it. The recording began with a Frenchman introducing, in French, the Englishman Jack Hulbert who sang the song. Jack Hulbert then, in very halting and ungrammatical French, and with a strongly English accent, apologised for having forgotten most of the French he had learnt at school. Then he launched into the song. But between every verse he shouted “Bonsoir!” and a very French audience shouted back “Bonsoir!”

Anyway, with this song in my head for no particular reason, I turned to Youtube and Wikipedia. I found the song and listened to it and it was just as I remembered it from childhood, French interventions and all. I then looked up its particulars and discovered that Jack Hulbert first introduced the song in the English film Jack’s the Boy made in 1932. Where did the French element come in? Because Hulbert sang only one brief verse of the song in the film; but it was so popular that the recording company to which he was contracted chased him down to the south of France where he was holidaying, and recorded him singing the whole song in front of a French audience. The original 78 RPM recording declared on its label that it was recorded at Monte Carlo.

Jack’s the Boy was, I soon found out, a big commercial hit in England in 1932; one of the year’s most popular films. I discovered it starred both Jack Hulbert and his wife and life-long theatrical partner Cicely Courtneidge. 

 

 

That rang a bell for me. Often, as a child, I heard my father say how funny the team of Hulbert and Courtneidge were. In fact I can remember him once acting out an hilarious scene in which the two of them, walking down palatial stairs, were about to sing a romantic song on a balmy summer’s night but then had to start slapping themselves because of all the mosquitoes that were attacking them.

Ah! Slapstick! A very hard genre to reproduce. I had to take Dad’s word for it that it was funny.

Anyway, having tracked down “The Flies Crawled Up the Window” on Youtube, I decided to see if Youtube had this hilarious, money-making 1932 Hulbert and Courtneidge film Jack’s the Boy. It did and I watched it.

Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!

I am very tolerant of the primitive film techniques that prevailed in the early talkie era. Some of my favourite movies are silents and early talkies. But, even by the standards of its day, Jack’s the Boy reeked of “quota quickie” – one of those cheap British films that were made to meet the requirement, in the 1930s, that cinemas in Britain had to show at least as many British films as American or other foreign ones.

Stagey. Long sequences with a static camera simply staring at the action. Few close-ups. Over-acting even as farces go.

And it was a farce.

Jack Hulbert (a man with an elongated chin of the sort that P.G.Wodehouse once described as “like the ram on a battleship”) plays a ne’er-do-well playboy who is the despair of his stern father, a high-ranking police officer. Jack sings a tiny scrap of “The Flies Crawled Up the Window” in the opening sequence when he is rolling home late at night with some of his drinking pals. To win his father’s approval, Jack covertly joins the police as an ordinary constable on the beat. And, so the tale goes, he rounds up some crooks and does eventually win his father’s approval as well as getting the girl – though oddly the girl is Winifred Shotter, not Cicely Courtneidge. En route there is much obvious (and clumsy) slapstick, a few attempts at comic dancing by Courtneidge and Hulbert, and many obvious puns.

It was, quite simply, painful to sit through but, heroically, I persisted watching it to the very end – a very unconvincing stand-off between crooks and police in Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks and then the happy-ending-with-girl.

I do not think it would be acceptable as a mere supporting feature even a decade or two after it was made. How on Earth did it become a hit? And why on Earth did my father regard Hulbert and Courtneidge as hilariously funny?

But at this point my profound reflection on tastes of the past has to kick in.

Let’s transport our minds back 90 years.

In 1932, my father would have been 16. Talking films had been around for only five or so years, and they were introduced a little later in New Zealand. They were still a cause for wonderment. People did not have television. Seeing a film would for most people have been a once-a-week experience. Audiences were not bombarded with comedy routines 24/7 on TV, the internet and podcasts. In one sense, it was easier for comedians to win an audience. And in New Zealand, there was the miracle of seeing on screen famous performers from the other side of the world. “Stagey” films were quite acceptable – I can remember my parents and some of their contemporaries chuckling over remembered bits of the filmed Aldwych Farces that were appearing on New Zealand cinema screens at about the same time as Jack’s the Boy.

            So I reconstruct in my mind my father, a teenager with some of his pals, sitting in a picture-theatre in 1932, watching on the big screen well-known British farceurs and laughing at all their jigs, gags, songs and clumsiness. It was novelty. It was new. It was the week’s entertainment.

            That we judge it differently now means only that we live in a different context and time zone. And we should consider humbly how our current entertainments will be judged by the audience of the year 2111.