The Punch and Judy Man
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The Punch and Judy Man is a British comedy film from 1962. It was Tony Hancock's second film in a starring role, following The Rebel (1961).
[edit] Plot
Based on Hancock's childhood memories of Bournemouth, the film is set in the early 1950s in the sleepy fictional seaside town of Piltdown. Hancock plays Wally Pinner, the dilapidated Punch and Judy Man. Wally and the other beach entertainers, the Sandman (played by John Le Mesurier) who makes sand sculptures, and Neville the photographer, (played by Mario Fabrizi) are socially unacceptable to the towns snobbish elite.
Wally's wife, Delia, played by Sylvia Syms, 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 Murray), who is to switch on the town's illuminations, and at the Mayoress's suggestion the Reception Committee invite Wally to entertain.
The illumination 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.
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.
[edit] Background
The town of Piltdown is apparently named after Piltdown Man.
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 Webb. 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 Hour, also appear in supporting roles. John Le Mesurier gives a gem of a performance as a gentleman sculptor, who has found a shabby-genteel niche in life, while Hugh Lloyd, Mario Fabrizi and Hattie Jacques also appear. The pace of the film is accidental, but superbly understated, due to director Jeremy Summers imperfect sense of comedy timing.
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 Tati's film Monsieur Hulot's Holiday 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 Palin created a film thirty years later called A Private Function, with a similar theme of social acceptance in a small seaside town.
The film itself was shot on location in Bognor Regis, 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.
