One of the many unmade Alexander Mackendrick film projects detailed in Philip Kemp's biography Lethal Innocence is an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinoceros.
An international success, the play was set in a French provincial town where, one by one, the inhabitants were turning into rhinos. It was a political allegory, based on the Romanian writer's pre-war memories of the way his friends gradually joined the fascist Iron Guard.
And the person who Mackendrick wanted to play the hero Bérenger, the only character who doesn't become a rhino, was Tony Hancock.
According to Kemp, Mackendrick said:
"He was so right. He had this hunted look of a person who knew that everybody was turning into a rhinoceros."
As David Cairns says on his Shadowplay blog, that's "a very precise trait, not easy to find".
But then Mackendrick had a weakness for actors who looked hunted. Remember his slightly worrying comment on the casting of Fergus McClelland to play the lead in Sammy Going South:
He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails ... a really strong character. He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting.
Anyway, Tony Hancock eventually pulled out of the possible film, just as Peter Sellers did the second time it came close to being made.
But if Mackendrick was so keen to film a rhino, he could have shot this scene from W.H. Canaway's original novel Sammy Going South:
Sammy heard a whiffling of breath behind him, and turned to confront a rhinoceros, which had been waiting behind the thorns before returning to scatter its dung.
Up till that moment the thought of danger from animals had scarcely entered Sammy's mind; he had spent the previous night in his tree because of some atavistic instinct, and not because of any conscious desire to safeguard himself against predatory creatures. Now, he stared at the rhino with sick horror, giving a low moan of fear. He had never realized that a rhino was so big. This one was a huge shape of dirty grey, almost six feet tall at the shoulder and almost twelve feet long; its horn was five feet of polished murderous fibre. The rhino was downwind of Sammy, and had picked up his scent at once.
There were birds sitting on its back, Sammy noticed.
The rhino was perhaps a hundred feet away, at the far left-hand end of the thorns. It snorted again, shook its head once, and then lowered it, charging; the birds flapped on its body. It moved with surprising speed, picking up and setting down its feet with delicate precision, while Sammy turned and began to run, hopelessly.
I do like the placing of that adverb.
Whether Sammy Going South was ever a set text for the examination boards I don't know, but it would have made a change from Lord of the bloody Flies.
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