The Punch and Judy Man is a
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
comedy filmComedy film is a genre of film in which the main emphasis is on humour. Also, films in this style typically have a happy ending . One of the oldest genres in film, some of the very first silent movies were comedies...
from
1963The year 1963 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* June 12 - Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton premieres at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City....
directed by
Jeremy SummersJeremy Summers is a retired British television director and film director, best known for his directorship of ITC productions in the 1960s and 1970s, most notably The Saint.-Background:...
. It was
Tony HancockAnthony John "Tony" Hancock was a British actor and comedian.-Early life and career:Hancock was born in Southam Road, Hall Green, Birmingham, England, but from the age of three was brought up in Bournemouth, where his father, John Hancock, who ran the Railway Hotel in Holdenhurst Road, worked as a...
's second film in a starring role, following
The RebelThe film The Rebel is a satirical comedy starring the British comedian Tony Hancock, and written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.-Plot:...
(1961).
Based on Hancock's childhood memories of
BournemouthBournemouth is a large coastal resort town in the Borough of Bournemouth, England. The town has a population of 163,444 according to the 2001 Census, making it the largest settlement in Dorset. It is the largest town on the south coast and the largest settlement between Southampton and Plymouth...
, the film is set in the early 1950s in the sleepy fictional seaside town of Piltdown. Hancock plays Wally Pinner, the dilapidated
Punch and JudyPunch and Judy is a traditional, popular English puppet show featuring the characters of Punch and his wife Judy. The performance consists of a sequence of short scenes, each depicting an interaction between two characters, most typically the anarchic Punch and one other character...
Man. Wally and the other beach entertainers, the Sandman (played by
John Le MesurierJohn Le Mesurier was a BAFTA Award-winning English actor...
) who makes sand sculptures, and Neville the photographer, (played by
Mario FabriziMario Fabrizi was an English comedian and actor of Italian descent active in Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s....
) are socially unacceptable to the towns snobbish elite.
Wally's wife, Delia, played by
Sylvia SymsSylvia Syms OBE is an English actress. She is probably best known for her roles in the films The Tamarind Seed, Ice Cold in Alex, No Trees in the Street and Woman in a Dressing Gown, and is remembered by most for her film works in the 1950s and 1960s but is still active in films, television and...
, runs an antique shop below their flat, and is socially ambitious.
The Punch and Judy Man is a
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
comedy filmComedy film is a genre of film in which the main emphasis is on humour. Also, films in this style typically have a happy ending . One of the oldest genres in film, some of the very first silent movies were comedies...
from
1963The year 1963 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* June 12 - Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton premieres at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City....
directed by
Jeremy SummersJeremy Summers is a retired British television director and film director, best known for his directorship of ITC productions in the 1960s and 1970s, most notably The Saint.-Background:...
. It was
Tony HancockAnthony John "Tony" Hancock was a British actor and comedian.-Early life and career:Hancock was born in Southam Road, Hall Green, Birmingham, England, but from the age of three was brought up in Bournemouth, where his father, John Hancock, who ran the Railway Hotel in Holdenhurst Road, worked as a...
's second film in a starring role, following
The RebelThe film The Rebel is a satirical comedy starring the British comedian Tony Hancock, and written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.-Plot:...
(1961).
Plot
Based on Hancock's childhood memories of
BournemouthBournemouth is a large coastal resort town in the Borough of Bournemouth, England. The town has a population of 163,444 according to the 2001 Census, making it the largest settlement in Dorset. It is the largest town on the south coast and the largest settlement between Southampton and Plymouth...
, the film is set in the early 1950s in the sleepy fictional seaside town of Piltdown. Hancock plays Wally Pinner, the dilapidated
Punch and JudyPunch and Judy is a traditional, popular English puppet show featuring the characters of Punch and his wife Judy. The performance consists of a sequence of short scenes, each depicting an interaction between two characters, most typically the anarchic Punch and one other character...
Man. Wally and the other beach entertainers, the Sandman (played by
John Le MesurierJohn Le Mesurier was a BAFTA Award-winning English actor...
) who makes sand sculptures, and Neville the photographer, (played by
Mario FabriziMario Fabrizi was an English comedian and actor of Italian descent active in Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s....
) are socially unacceptable to the towns snobbish elite.
Wally's wife, Delia, played by
Sylvia SymsSylvia Syms OBE is an English actress. She is probably best known for her roles in the films The Tamarind Seed, Ice Cold in Alex, No Trees in the Street and Woman in a Dressing Gown, and is remembered by most for her film works in the 1950s and 1960s but is still active in films, television and...
, runs an antique shop below their flat, and is socially ambitious. To achieve this she needs to have Wally invited to entertain at the official reception for Lady Jane Caterham (
Barbara MurrayBarbara Murray is an English actress. She was married to the actor John Justin and had three daughters, but they were divorced in 1964....
), who is to switch on the town's illuminations, and at the Mayoress's suggestion the Reception Committee invite Wally to entertain.
The
illuminationIllumination, an observable property and effect of light, may also refer to:*Illumination , the use of light sources*Illumination , the use of light and shadow in art*Illumination , the artistic decoration of hand-written texts...
ceremony ends in farce when Wally's electric shaver shorts out some of the lights, causing some of the illuminated signs to display unflattering comments about the town.
The Dinner degenerates into a food fight when one of the drunken guests heckles Punch, and when Lady Jane rounds on Wally, Delia floors her with a punch. Her dreams of social acceptance are gone, but Wally and Delia retire, wiser and closer.
Background
The town of Piltdown is apparently named after
Piltdown ManThe "Piltdown Man" is a famous paleontological hoax concerning the finding of the remains of a previously unknown early human. The hoax find consisted of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex, England...
.
The film is a gentle but bitter-sweet comedy, and provides some considerable insight into Hancock himself. The screenplay by Hancock and Philip Oakes appears to be based partly on Hancock's own life and marriage. In one scene, Wally and Delia have breakfast in almost total silence, and the scene demonstrates that Wally and Delia are married from habit, and no longer have anything in common. The scene is often considered to be an observation on Hancock's marriage to the former Cicely Romanis at the time.
A still from the following scene shows Wally angrily ramming a bunch of flowers up a porcelain pig's backside. The script originally called for the flowers to go up the pig's nose, but Hancock argued that the joke had to be stronger and so a prop with a suitable orifice was made. In the event the shot appears to have been cut from the final film. In the next scene Delia discovers the flower-adorned pig, but the audience has to guess how it got that way.
In another scene, Wally retreats from the rain into an ice cream parlour with a small boy, played by Sylvia Syms' nephew,
Nicholas WebbNicholas "Nick" Webb was an English acoustic guitarist, composer, and co-founder of contemporary jazz group Acoustic Alchemy...
. The boy asks for a large sundae (a "Piltdown Glory") and Wally orders the same. Then, because he is uncertain of the correct etiquette for eating the dessert, Wally carefully watches the boy and imitates his every move.
The scene was done in several takes and in between in take Hancock would rinse his mouth with vodka to remove the taste of the ice cream.
Several actors from Hancock's successful television series,
Hancock's Half HourHancock's Half Hour was a BBC radio comedy, and later television comedy, series of the 1950s. It starred Tony Hancock, with Sid James; the radio version also co-starring Hattie Jacques, Bill Kerr and Kenneth Williams...
, also appear in supporting roles.
John Le MesurierJohn Le Mesurier was a BAFTA Award-winning English actor...
givesa performance as a gentleman sculptor, who has found a shabby-genteel niche in life, while
Hugh LloydHugh Lewis Lloyd, MBE was an English actor who made his name in television. He was best known for appearances in Hugh and I and other sitcoms of the 1960s.-Life:...
,
Mario FabriziMario Fabrizi was an English comedian and actor of Italian descent active in Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s....
and
Hattie JacquesJosephine Edwina Jaques was an English comedy actress, known by the stage name Hattie Jacques....
also appear.
Roger Wilmut, in
Tony Hancock: Artiste, argues that the climactic food fight escalates too quickly and that a more experienced director would have been given it more time to develop comedically.
Visually,
The Punch and Judy Man is reminiscent of
Jacques TatiJacques Tati was a noted French comedic filmmaker. He was born Jacques Tatischeff, the son of Russian father Georges-Emmanuel Tatischeff and Dutch mother Marcelle Claire Van Hoof, in Le Pecq, Yvelines, and died in Paris....
's film
Monsieur Hulot's HolidayLes Vacances de M. Hulot , is one of Jacques Tati's most famous films, gaining an international reputation for its director upon its release in 1953. Les Vacances introduced the pipe-smoking, well-meaning but clumsy character of M...
as they are both shot in monochrome and show a sleepy seaside town in the early 1950's. Both have a unique style of visual humour, and both are an historian's delight in being comments on the society of the time.
Michael PalinMichael Edward Palin, CBE is an English comedian, actor, writer and television presenter best known for being one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and for his travel documentaries....
created a film thirty years later called
A Private FunctionA Private Function is a 1984 British comedy film starring Michael Palin and Maggie Smith. The film was predominantly filmed in Ilkley and Ben Rhydding, West Yorkshire. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival....
, with a similar theme of social acceptance in a small seaside town.
The film itself was shot on location in
Bognor RegisBognor Regis is a seaside resort town and civil parish in the Arun District of West Sussex, on the south coast of England. It lies south southwest of London, west of Brighton, and southeast of the county town of Chichester. Other nearby towns include Littlehampton east northeast and Selsey to...
, and when the producers asked for some local people to take parts as extras, over 2000 people turned up. Many parts of the town are immortalised in the film, from the Pier and the Town Hall, alongside other areas such as Spencer Street, Belmont Street, and York Road, beside the Esplanade and Royal Hotel, where in fact the film crew stayed. Tony Hancock himself resided at the Royal Norfolk Hotel during filming.
Cast
- Tony Hancock
Anthony John "Tony" Hancock was a British actor and comedian.-Early life and career:Hancock was born in Southam Road, Hall Green, Birmingham, England, but from the age of three was brought up in Bournemouth, where his father, John Hancock, who ran the Railway Hotel in Holdenhurst Road, worked as a...
— Wally Pinner
- Sylvia Syms
Sylvia Syms OBE is an English actress. She is probably best known for her roles in the films The Tamarind Seed, Ice Cold in Alex, No Trees in the Street and Woman in a Dressing Gown, and is remembered by most for her film works in the 1950s and 1960s but is still active in films, television and...
— Delia Pinner
- John Le Mesurier
John Le Mesurier was a BAFTA Award-winning English actor...
— The Sandman
- Ronald Fraser
Ronald Fraser was an English character actor, who appeared in numerous British films of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s whilst also appearing in many popular TV shows. He is the father of actor Hugh Fraser....
— Mayor
- Barbara Murray
Barbara Murray is an English actress. She was married to the actor John Justin and had three daughters, but they were divorced in 1964....
— Lady Caterham
- Hugh Lloyd
Hugh Lewis Lloyd, MBE was an English actor who made his name in television. He was best known for appearances in Hugh and I and other sitcoms of the 1960s.-Life:...
— Edward Cox
- Mario Fabrizi
Mario Fabrizi was an English comedian and actor of Italian descent active in Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s....
— Nevile Shanks