‘Unfailing capacity to cheer me up’: why The Insurgent is my feelgood film

For me, memorable and/or uplifting movie experiences are typically round particular person moments – the resurrection scene in The Matrix for instance, or Dizzy’s “I obtained to have you ever” in Starship Troopers. (Do both actually maintain a candle to Mel Brooks’s A Little Piece of Poland quantity within the To Be Or To not Be remake? The jury remains to be out.) However with out desirous to sound like both a retro bore or a they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to fuddy-duddy, I flip to Tony Hancock’s yuk-heavy characteristic automobile from 1961 for its unfailing capacity to cheer me up.

I feel I will need to have first watched it within the Eighties on TV, after my dad solemnly recited one of many movie’s nice moments, when Hancock gives a hunk of cheese to a blue-lipsticked beatnik Nanette Newman and says, with a type of slack-jawed terror: “You do eat meals?” Newman, because it occurs, is probably The Insurgent’s most superb sight: in any other case often known as the apparently-prim English star of the primary Stepford Wives film, a middlebrow popular-culture staple within the UK for her washing-up liquid TV commercials, she is tricked out right here in a implausible exi get-up – dead-white face paint, Nefertiti eyeliner, lank copper-coloured hairdo – at nearly the very same second in time that the Beatles have been being talked into ditching their teddy boy quiff.

The Insurgent in reality is filled with nice moments: Hancock’s opposite-platform ruse to get a seat on a packed commuter practice (not even theoretically doable, sadly); Hancock appalling waitress Liz Fraser by refusing “frothy” espresso; Oliver Reed glowering in a Parisian cafe as he argues about artwork, of all issues; and Hancock’s epic action-painting sequence full with bicycle and cow. And naturally, the chef’s kiss: the beautiful second when connoisseur critic George Sanders chortles dismissively about Hancock’s “childish college” image of a foot (“Who painted that – the cow?”)

US readers may know the movie as Name Me Genius, as that reportedly was the title it was launched beneath there, however fairly probably they received’t comprehend it in any respect; Hancock, acclaimed in Britain, by no means made headway in Hollywood or on US TV. However the different title is definitely as correct a abstract of the movie as the unique one; though the script (by Hancock confreres Galton and Simpson) seems to mock the pretensions of the artwork world, its goal is de facto the delusional nature of Hancock’s Walter Mitty-ish workplace drone, who finally ends up again in his suburban bedsit after a meteoric rise and fall in Paris’s avant-garde circles.

It’s a personality that pulls absolutely on the persona that Hancock had made his personal over the previous decade: the intellectually bold however unfailingly thwarted no one, hanging on like grim loss of life for higher instances across the nook however fatalistically resigned to submergence in a tidal wave of mediocrity. I can’t consider any equal within the US; Hancock is, I sense, far too defeated and self-pitying a determine ever to command a large viewers. George Costanza might be the closest, however Hancock has little of Costanza’s frenzied self-hate.

Effectively, there’s something fairly fantastic about seeing Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock in full and dwelling color, working on the peak of his powers, the person who his writers described as “the perfect comedian actor within the enterprise”. And naturally the movie is a superb portal to a vanished world, a net-curtained Britain simply on the cusp of its transformation by 60s popular culture. Lucian Freud known as The Insurgent the perfect movie ever made about fashionable artwork; properly, he ought to know, however for me it’s greater than that – there’s an additional pleasure in remembering the hours I spent tittering at it with Dad as we lolled on the three-piece suite again in my gormless teenage years. If something makes me really feel good, it’s that.