Lowe, it seems, concluded that if Columbia was going to be difficult, so, too, would he, and his subsequent behaviour drove Chuck the props man (who for some reason best known to himself had nicknamed the actor ‘Kitty’)17 to complain that the fussy star was causing him more trouble in a few weeks than Gregory Peck had done during an entire year of filming The Guns of Navarone.18 Lowe’s most notorious gesture of rebellion was sparked off by what he judged to be the excessive heaviness of the .38 revolver that he was expected to use: he announced that, as it was never actually going to be fired, a lighter, plastic replica would surely suffice, and, when the props department failed to find one, he went off in search of one himself. He was still dressed in his Home Guard uniform when he ordered a unit car to take him out to the nearest branch of Woolworth’s, where, to his great annoyance, he was advised that there was nothing in stock that was really suitable apart from a relatively pricey Roy Rogers Special. ‘You could always buy a sixpenny pistol in Wool-worth’s when I was a lad,’19 he grumbled as he made his way back to the studio (and to the cumbersome prop that from this moment on would be referred to, behind his back, as ‘Kitty’s revolver’).20
The actors might have been more tolerant of the studio had they not felt so concerned about the screenplay. John Le Mesurier complained that it was ‘little more than three half hour episodes joined together’,21 but it was actually far less coherent than that. Croft and Perry’s original script had been ‘opened out’ by Cohen, who had looked to replace the intimacy of the television show with something more ‘cinematic’, and then Cohen’s version had been ‘pumped up’ by Columbia executives who were looking for something with a stronger plot and a faster pace, and the finished product, unsurprisingly, was the kind of screenplay that tried to please everyone but failed to satisfy anyone.22 The first two-thirds of the movie were basically a gently embellished reprise of the first television series, encompassing most of the key scenes and sequences from the formation of the LDV to the arrival of uniforms, weapons and a discernible Home Guard spirit. This was the section that still bore the distinctive fingerprints of Croft and Perry: the montage of authentic wartime images of the Wehrmacht, for example, recalled the title sequence that Croft had so wanted to use in the BBC shows, while the name of Mainwaring’s bank – ‘Martin’s’ rather than ‘Swallow’ – referred back to Perry’s first draft of his 1967 pilot script (a short-lived copyright problem had prompted the original alteration), and the interaction between the central characters remained broadly true to the high television standards:
WILSON The Germans have reached Holland.
MAINWARING Good lord! How on earth did they manage to do that? I could’ve sworn that they’d never break through the Maginot Line.
WILSON Quite right, sir – they didn’t.
MAINWARING Ah-ha! I thought not. I’m a pretty good judge of these matters, you know, Wilson.
WILSON They went round the side.
MAINWARING I see. (he does a double-take) They what?
WILSON They went round the side.
MAINWARING That’s a typical shabby Nazi trick! You see the sort of people we’re up against, Wilson?
WILSON Most unreliable, sir.23
The final third of the movie, however, saw the familiar brand of character-driven comedy replaced by a clumsy kind of caper: three German pilots are forced to bail out over Walmington-on-Sea, where they stroll into the church hall during one of the mayor’s meetings and hold all of those present as hostages; Mainwaring’s men arrive just after Hodges has absconded through a back window and alerted the ‘proper’ authorities, and the subsequent intervention of the Regular Army leaves the platoon with no choice but to act on its own initiative.
The screenplay was shot through with a nervy spirit of compromise: it was a comedy in celebration of the amateur that was afraid to poke fun at the professional; a comedy about an invasion that never actually materialises, but with an actual mini-invasion thrown in for good measure. ‘The big mistake,’ said Ian Lavender, ‘was that we saw the Germans. I know we had glimpses of them in the odd episode of the television series, but most of the time there was no real evidence of what Mainwaring and his platoon were really up against; the comedy was about these characters who were waiting to confront the enemy – it wasn’t “about” the enemy at all. The film, however, did show the enemy, the German HQ, the hordes of bombers, tanks, the battalions of marching men – it showed it all – and I think, in doing so, much of the cosiness, the charm, of the television show was lost.’24
There were some nice touches – such as the series of cross-cuts that contrasted Nazi organisation (‘All divisional commanders will be in touch with me by shortwave radio’) with Home Guard improvisation (‘All section leaders will be in touch with me by Boy Scout runners’) – but there were also some clumsy, Carry On-style intrusions – such as the line (which deserved to be underscored by the sound of a trombone) that obliged Mainwaring to exclaim, ‘I must ask you to take your hands off my privates.’ There would have been far more errors both of detail and judgement had Jimmy Perry not been on hand to intervene. ‘I don’t think they were terribly fond of Jimmy,’ remembered Bill Pertwee. ‘He’d keep stopping and saying, “Look, I’m sorry, but this just isn’t right, this scene, because that costume isn’t right,” or whatever, and they’d say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. People won’t notice that sort of thing. Get on with it.” But Jimmy was persistent, and he did manage to get one or two things changed.’25
Neither Perry nor Croft had much faith in Norman Cohen’s eye for comedy: ‘He missed the reactions to funny lines,’ complained Croft. ‘I ended up having to write a letter to Columbia, saying, “For God’s sake, can you look through the out-takes to find some reaction shots from Arthur?” They did find a few, but not enough, in my view.’26 The most glaring example of Cohen’s comedic inexperience came with a scene early on in the movie, in which Mainwaring refused to cash the £10 cheque of an unfamiliar customer (played by Bernard Archard) on the grounds that he ‘might be a German spy’: instead of following the irate customer (‘Damned bank clerk!’) back out on to the street, where it is revealed that he is actually Major General Fullard (one of Mainwaring’s future superior officers and his most vehement critic), Cohen elected to end the scene at the counter. Perry, understandably, was horrified, pointing out that the only reason he and Croft had written the scene in the first place was to set up the later confrontation between the two pompous little men; the axiom ‘Always let the audience in on the joke’ was one of the ‘golden rules’ of Dad’s Army, and he could not understand why Cohen felt entitled to depart from it.27 Perry, eventually, won this particular battle, and the scene was allowed to reach its intended conclusion, but Cohen and Columbia would be the ones to win the war.
None of the actors felt much like fighting any more after filming a challenging sequence in Chobham. A white horse – ‘borrowed’ from a popular whisky commercial of the time – was supposed to carry first Major General Fullard, and then Lance Corporal Jones, downstream on a raft. ‘After three weeks of practice,’ recalled Clive Dunn, ‘we were told that the stunt was no longer frightening, but nobody had bothered to tell the horse!’:
If I had been allowed to sit astride, I might have managed like Bernard Archard, but the action called for me to lie along the animal without gripping with my legs, merely clinging round its neck. On the shout ‘Action!’ the raft moved downstream and the frightened horse started bucking, rearing and stamping about. I thought this was the moment of truth and that the animal would rear backwards on top of me as we both fell into the river. Some of the more boring bits of my past life flashed before me and so did my lunch. All this, plus half an hour hanging perilously from a branch over the deep river, frightened the daylights out of me and the small round of applause, led by my family who were watching the filming, for these death-defying achievements hardly compensated. When the camera zoomed in to a close-up of me begging the horse to control itself, I wasn’t actin
g.28
In a later section of the same sequence, Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier and John Laurie had to accompany the horse on the raft as it drifted down the river. The erratic movements of the hidden tow lines that were meant to be controlling the raft unbalanced the horse, causing it to slip and fall on John Laurie, badly bruising his ribs. It had been a fairly harrowing day, and, as John Le Mesurier would reflect, it was not over yet:
As sun set at about seven o’clock, some clever publicity fellow thought it would be splendid if he could get a long shot of several of the platoon on the horse’s back. We climbed on to this dear creature, someone shouted, ‘Action!’ and the horse, being tired after a long day, sank a few inches into the muddy banks of the Thames. She then reared up and threw us off. I landed in John Laurie’s lap, which momentarily winded him. My wrist-watch disappeared into the Thames. Naturally, I put in for an over-extravagant sum in compensation. But next morning, someone had to go and retrieve it from the river. I could have killed him.29
Filming came to an end on Friday, 25 September, with the completion of a few minor inserts. Arthur Lowe congratulated himself on keeping his trousers up for the duration (John Le Mesurier had been left to lead the men in their underwear for Perry’s ‘passage of time’ montage, while Lowe provided the rather smug voice-over: ‘Jerry will never catch us with our trousers down!’), and everyone else congratulated themselves simply for having reached the end of an exhausting and sadly unrewarding month-and-a-half. The cast had grown rather fond of Norman Cohen – whom Le Mesurier described as ‘a kind of pixie in the Irish/Jewish tradition’30 – but his inadequacies as a director of comedy, coupled with his haste to meet his deadlines, had undermined some good performances. No one felt sorry to leave Shepperton and hurry back to London and the BBC: the first episode of the fourth television series was broadcast on the same day that work stopped on the movie, and several episodes still had to be shot. ‘There wasn’t really time for regrets,’ said Ian Lavender. ‘We just got on with the next thing.’31
Dad’s Army: The Movie received its UK premiére on 12 March 1971 at the Columbia Theatre in London. The newspaper reviews that ensued were, on the whole, inclined to be charitable: the Daily Mirror’s Dick Richards, for example, reported that the movie ‘produces no belly laughs but a lot of reminiscent smiles and enjoyment’,32 while Ian Christie commented in the Daily Express that the actors were in ‘good form’ even though the film lacked a ‘good plot’,33 Derek Malcolm remarked in the Guardian that the ‘rather clumsy but not utterly guileless attempt to translate a telly favourite into a movie money-spinner’ was boosted by Arthur Lowe’s ‘supreme’ performance,34 and Alexander Walker of the London Evening Standard predicted that the movie, which encouraged ‘easy and affectionate laughter’, would ‘appeal most to those who like to leave the box behind at home – and have an outing to the cinema to see the same thing’.35 Monthly Film Bulletin’s Sylvia Millar, on the other hand, complained that the ‘central joke’ of Dad’s Army – ‘the perpetual non-appearance of the enemy against which Mainwaring’s po-faced vigilance is eternally pitted’ – had been betrayed by the decision to bring into view ‘three quite lethal Germans’ (‘the spell is broken’), and she lamented the loss of the television show’s ‘intimacy and subtlety of characterisation’, as well as ‘the introduction of coarsening and inflating elements which overwhelm, almost to extinction, the fragile, nostalgic humour of the original’.36
In spite of the fact that the movie was, technically speaking, American, there was no serious attempt by Columbia to market the production on its own side of the Atlantic. The one significant US review – which appeared in the trade journal Variety – advised its readers (in its own peculiar patois) that non-British audiences ‘may find some of the humor too parochial, but certain quick yocks and gag situations are all right in any lingo’. The critique concluded by declaring that ‘Dad’s Army is not going to make a permanent mark in film history, but farcically it contributes a warm tribute to British war history. It will certainly please middle-agers and those who lately have been hooked on a tv idea that, at the time it was begat, must have seemed a most unlikely project.’37
The movie might have been a disappointment, but it was far from being a disaster. It had been inexpensive to make, it performed well at the domestic box office,38 and it would go on to age much better than the majority of other big screen situation-comedies of the era: when it was shown for the first time on British television, on 5 May 1979, more than thirteen million viewers tuned in to watch.39 David Croft and Jimmy Perry, however, could not see it as anything other than a missed opportunity, and they resolved to try again – only the next time, they agreed, it would be done their way.
An outline, entitled ‘Dad’s Army and the Secret U-boat Base’, was completed and distributed to a number of interested parties. The story was set in a small coastal town in North Wales: after several British warships sink in the Irish Sea, the War Office comes to suspect that the Germans have managed to establish a clandestine base somewhere along the coast; rather than draw attention to the investigation by sending in the Regular Army, the most innocuous-looking Home Guard unit the War Office can find, the Walmington-on-Sea platoon, is chosen to visit the area – ostensibly for manoeuvres – and sniff out the Nazis. Laurence Olivier, who was an avid admirer of the show, heard of the project, read the treatment, and subsequently expressed an interest in playing the key role of a Nazi leader who has taken over a country house and passed himself off as the lord of the manor. The funding, however, failed to materialise quickly enough, and Croft and Perry soon became distracted by their various television commitments; the moment was allowed to pass, and the project was consigned, for good, to the darkness of the bottom drawer.40
Dad’s Army never would make it back on to the big screen. The move from one medium to the other had always been ill-conceived: the cinema framed the situation-comedy, it gave it a beginning, middle and end, whereas television allowed it to flow. There was no cause for regret: the show was still big – it was just the pictures that were small.
CHAPTER XII
Shaftesbury Avenue
Can we anywhere recapture the olden pleasure?
MAX BEERBOHM1
Stand by with your concertina.
GEORGE MAINWARING2
The cinema would not be the final digression for Dad’s Army. In 1975, the decision was made to place the cast upon the stage. The show might not have been suited to the theatre, but Croft and Perry were, and, in a period before home video, the venture represented a good opportunity to exploit the programme’s popularity with the public.
The plan was to use a fairly loose revue format as a showcase for both the actors and their characters: space would be found for special individual ‘turns’ as well as routines for the whole ensemble, and the situation-comedy’s familiar features would be woven together with a range of real-life wartime themes. Details of the production had first been revealed to the cast during the previous summer’s fortnight of filming in Thetford. Jimmy Perry got up one evening after dinner at the Bell Hotel, announced that he and his co-writer had been working on one or two ideas, and then, just like he used to do in his concert party days in India, he proceeded to act out every sketch and sing every song in the show, impersonating Churchill, Mainwaring, Max Miller, Pike, Robb Wilton, Wilson, a Nazi officer, the vicar, the verger and Hodges, jumping up and down, running from one side of the room to the other and even having a go at a one-man conga. ‘Well,’ he finally inquired, panting heavily, ‘how does that sound?’ Edward Sinclair, who had sat through it all in silence, replied: ‘I’m tired out and the show hasn’t even started yet!’3
Reactions to the proposal were mixed: Arthur Lowe, despite his snobbery about Variety, was fairly positive (particularly after it had been agreed that his wife, Joan, would also be appearing as Godfrey’s sister, Dolly), whereas John Le Mesurier, as was his wont, remained unconvinced that it would work. John Laurie declined to take part, fearing
that, at the age of 78, the slog might prove too much of a strain, but Arnold Ridley decided to brave it. Clive Dunn agreed to join in even though he felt there was a danger that the transfer from screen to stage would turn out to be ‘diminishing’,4 and, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the remaining members of the cast fell into line.
Croft and Perry enlisted the services of an old mutual friend, the eminently well-connected theatrical agent Richard Stone, to help them find a suitable producer. Stone duly found them two: ‘We offered it to Duncan [Weldon], who was not yet rich enough to present what had emerged as quite a large revue-type musical without some financial help. Fortunately my old friend Bernie Delfont was happy to co-present and put up the money.’5 Stone also found someone to stage it: Roger Redfarn, a promising young talent (and client of Stone’s) who, in stark contrast to the likes of John R. Sloan or Norman Cohen, was quite prepared to work closely, and tactfully, with the two co-writers. A team was then put together: Ed Coleman, a vocal and energetic American, was brought in as the show’s musical director; the well-regarded dancer Sheila O’Neill was installed as choreographer; the BBC’s Mary Husband was handed the task of creating the costumes; and the experienced Terry Parsons was drafted in as the show’s designer. Hamish Roughead,6 a suitably mature Scottish actor, was chosen to play the part of Frazer, and John Bardon7 was selected to play Walker, but neither role, in the absence of the original actor, was set to be much more than a cipher. ‘I think Hamish Roughead, at least early on, was deeply upset at just how small the part of Frazer turned out to be,’ recalled Ian Lavender. ‘But Johnny Bardon was totally realistic about it from the start, saying, “We can’t feature largely, obviously, because we’re not the person they actually want to see.” Which was right. That’s one of the peculiarities of television: audiences will accept all kinds of actors playing Hamlet, but only one actor can play Sergeant Wilson, or Jones, or Walker, or Frazer.’8 Redfarn also cast Jeffrey Holland9 as an eccentric Nazi inventor, but he would also serve as the understudy to both John Bardon and Ian Lavender: ‘Straightaway,’ said Redfarn, ‘Jimmy and David liked him so whenever any extra bits cropped up, he got them.’10
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