Alexander Mackendrick, Tony Hancock and Rhinoceros

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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.

Ian Holm as Richard III in the BBC's Wars of the Roses from 1965

First, Fergus McClelland led us to Brecht on television. Now, bless his little khaki shorts, he's led us to Shakespeare.

Ravensbourne University London explains the origins of the BBC's Wars of the Roses:

This production had had a highly acclaimed run on the RSC stage in 1963 and was directed for BBC Television in 1965 by Robin Midgley and Michael Hayes. It was filmed on the stage at Stratford-On-Avon using a multi-camera set up, resulting in a much more fluid filmic result with a greater variety of shots and even the use of hand-held cameras for the battle scenes. 

In this respect the production was a forerunner of today’s recorded theatre productions which are regularly streamed to cinemas and homes throughout the world.

The Wars of the Roses was an abridgement of four Shakespeare plays – the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III – into three plays: Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III.

You can find an extract from the third of these above. McClelland is playing Edward V, the elder of the Princes in the Tower, having played the similarly ill-fated Edmund, Duke of Rutland, earlier in the production.

But the real interest is Ian Holm's Richard III, who here appears not as a monster but very much the younger brother to the charismatic Edward IV that he was.

This recording is of some importance to theatrical history, because Holm was struck down with stage fright in the Seventies and thereafter chose to concentrate on film and television work.

Fergus McClelland was the last illegal major British child actor

Before Section 37 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1963 was enacted it was illegal for a child under 13 to appear in a film made in Britain. As I pointed out in an earlier post, this law was widely ignored. 

And I could have added Mandy Miller to the examples given there. She was six when she made a brief appearance in The Man in the White Suit and seven when she played the title role in Mandy.

The director of both those Ealing films was Alexander Mackendrick, and he was still breaking the law when he shot Sammy Going South, because his young lead Fergus McClelland was only 11.

Though you'd think that a completed feature film would make pretty good evidence in court, producers generally avoided legal trouble by keeping their use of such a young actor secret until the film was released.

So a short article about the boy in the Daily Herald (10 January 1963) says that his three-month absence from school while he was filming on location in Africa was explained by telling his classmates that he was on an educational tour.

The article concludes by saying:

The company who made the film, Bryanston Seven Arts, could be prosecuted for employing anyone as young as Fergus in a film studio. But the maximum penalty would be only a £5 fine. And the film cost £500,000 to make.

Richard Farmer has written about this illegal employment of child actors, and he shows that companies could be fined rather more than that:

In 1949, 12-year-old Bobby Driscoll, who had already appeared in films such as Song of the South (1946) and The Window (1949), arrived in Britain to make Treasure Island for Disney at Denham. Disney did not seek to obtain the necessary employment permit for Driscoll, in large part because of his age meant that he could not legally be allowed to work in Britain.

Driscoll, his father, and Disney were each fined £100. Treasure Island’s producers reworked their schedule, at a reported cost of $84,000, to allow the young star to complete shooting as quickly as possible, claiming to have "too much money involved" in the film to replace Driscoll and concerned that he might at some point be prohibited from returning to the studio.

Farmer says the Disney company felt it was being singled out for special treatment, and you can see why. The year before, David Lean's Oliver Twist, complete with nine-year-old John Howard Davies in the title role, had been chosen for the Royal Film Performance – Davies later described being presented to Queen Mary as most terrifying experience of his life. Sammy Going South received the same accolade in 1963.

The 1963 Act allowed the employment of actors under 13, but made local authorities responsible for ensuring their welfare. This regularised what had often been happening in practice:

Some local authorities found it easier to ensure child safety in studios by coming to extra-statutory agreements with producers that permitted filmmakers to employ children on the understanding that council officers were able to ensure that a child’s welfare and education was being appropriately attended to.

And if you were working for Alexander Mackendrick, you needed protection. Fergus McClelland remembered in his 2020 interview with Matthew Sweet:

There was one point when I worked solid for 17 days from six in the morning till nine at night, and I was 11 and a half. The unit doctor said to Sandy Mackendrick, who was a fantastic director but very driven: "Look, you can either have a dead star or a live little boy. Which do you want?"

What was his answer?

What can we do to make him healthy and get him filming more?

McClelland survived the experience, acting for another 10 years before disappearing from view. He re-emerged later in life as a trainer in public speaking and business presentation, in which guise you can find him all over YouTube.

Other child stars were not so lucky. Bobby Driscoll died from drug addiction at 30 and was buried anonymously burial in a pauper's grave.

Sammy Going South and the morality of employing child actors

The director of Trouble at Townsend wasn't the only one to have problems with a child star being too well fed. I've read accounts of both Carol Reed and Andrei Tarkovsky making the same complaint.

But Alexander Mackendrick's account (from Wikpedia, with no source given) of the making of Sammy Going South suggests that Fergus McClelland didn't just get too well fed but too happy.

"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. 

"But when he went out to Africa, he started having the time of his life. The unit adored him and, to my dismay, started to feed him ... he put on weight and there was no way I could stop it. So, instead of this hunted and abused child, who’s supposed to be starving and neurotic, you had a sturdy, stocky, well fed little character. A good actor, but the physique betrayed itself."

McClelland talked about his experience of making the film in an interview with Matthew Sweet for BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme in 2010 – it begins at 24:14 – confirming much of what Mackendrick said. 

Fascinating as child actors can be, it's hard to escape the feeling that there's something inherently exploitative about their employment.

Mackendrick made the film for Michael Balcon's Bryanston Film's – Balcon had been his boss at Ealing Studios. Mark Duguid has suggested:

Balcon saw the story as a heartwarming tale of a young innocent's triumph over adversity, against the fantastic scenery of the African continent. Characteristically, Mackendrick's understanding was altogether darker: he saw it as "the inward odyssey of a deeply disturbed child, who destroys everybody he comes up against".

Mackendrick's attempt to satisfy these two interpretations is probably the reason the film doesn't quite succeed.

A motif Mackendrick's was innocent characters who caused chaos and destruction – think of Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers – so it's no surprise he was attracted to W.T. Canaway's original novel. Ironically, you could say the book managed to strike the balance between his and Balcon's ambitions that the film failed to find.

The original cut produced by Mackendrick was severely trimmed before release, and cut again for the US market. There it was given the ludicrous title A Boy Ten Feet Tall, apparently because it was feared white audiences would assume a film called Sammy Going South was about a black boy and stay away.

Sammy Going South is worth watching for its rare reference to the Suez Crisis in British films or novels and for about the last treatment in a film of British colonial Africa. Sammy's parents are killed in a British raid on Port Said, and he sets out to walk to the only other relative he knows, who lives in Durban in South Africa.

And Fergus McClelland's Sammy makes a credible and winning protagonist, even if Mackendrick was right to despair that he looks healthier and happier as his trek goes on.

Why Kenneth Williams wanted to be serviced by Terence Rattigan

Having recently posted a video of Fergus McClelland with Leo McKern in Brecht's Gallileo, yesterday I had a look in the British Newspaper Archive to see if he had gone on acting for long.

He did for a while, because here's a report from the Coventry Evening Telegraph for 14 March 1966, when he would have been 15:

Duke of Edinburgh Introduces 'Nelson' 

Duke of Edinburgh has recorded an introduction for ATV's specially commissioned play by Terence Rattigan: 'Nelson: A Study in Miniature,' to be screened at 9.25 tonight. 

The play has a strong cast headed by Michael Bryant and Rachel Roberts as Nelson and Lady Hamilton, and including Celia Johnson, Michael Hordern, Sir Felix Aylmer and Fergus McClelland. 

This interpretation of Nelson – which covers the 24 days he spent in London and at his country home at Merton before his final voyage to the West Indies and engagement of the combined French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar – is largely seen through the eyes of his nephew.

And as McClennan played the part of Nelson's nephew, he must have been central to the production.

Today an extract from an episode of Round the Horne appeared in my YouTube feed. It contained a classic Kenneth Williams rant about not being properly serviced by the scriptwriters – you can listen to it above.

And when you hear Williams say they should get Terence Rattigan to write the show, "then we could have Prince Philip introduce the show ... like he done that thing on Nelson," you will recognise what he was talking about, just as I did.

Incidentally, this a good example of how Round the Horne got away with murder. "Terence Rattigan would service me" indeed.

Kenneth Horne had a parallel career as a business executive and the view at the BBC seemed to be "Horne's a good man" and "If Horne's involved then it's probably all right."

I suppose this coincidence is just an example of the quantum level of weirdness I mentioned the other day, just as I mentioned Kenneth Williams and his wish to be serviced.

Brechtian television: Leo McKern in Galileo (1964)

"Has anyone ever produced Brechtian television?" I asked when writing about The Exorcism.

To an extent, they have. Because here are the first eight minutes of a 1964 television production of Brecht's play Galileo, and it begins with a shot of the cast arriving with a microphone boom and its operator purposely in shot.

This production was shown on BBC1 on Wednesday 29 April 1964 and the translation of the play is by Charles Laughton.

It's a shame that only this short section of this production is to be found online, because Leo McKern's performance looks very promising.

The boy is Fergus McClelland, who had starred in Alexander Mackendrick's film Sammy Going South the year before.

The Pumpkin Eater

Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her.

When I wrote about the Romance section of the Summer of British Film I looked forward to seeing The Pumpkin Eater. I have now watched it.

Like a lot of intelligent films from the 1960s (The Servant. Bunny Lake is Missing) it lacks a rounded plot with a simple resolution. But there are many things to enjoy in it.

Fine performances from Peter Finch and James Mason. Wonderful cameos from Maggie Smith and Yootha Joyce.

Above all there is a marvellous central performance from Anne Bancroft. She carries the film, and the power of that performance owes as much to her powerful, radiant face as to the way she speaks her lines, though her English accent is impeccable.

Beyond that, The Pumpkin Eater resembles the next film Jack Clayton was to direct - Our Mother's House. Both are scored by Georges Delerue and feature a tribe of children. In The Pumpkin Eater, because of its time scheme, each child character is played by two different child actors. We never really work out who is who, but that just adds to the sense that Bancroft has an unfeasibly large brood.

Among the child actors is Fergus McClelland, who had starred in Sammy Going South, and Elizabeth Nicholls, who was also in Our Mother's House. In the latter film at least she is instantly recognisable as the Phoebe Nicholls who played Cordelia in Brideshead Revisited.