David Sutton,
A Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy 1929-1939.
Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000.
ISBN 085989 603 X
294 pp
£40.00

(Review copy supplied by University of Exeter Press)

Uploaded 1 March 2001

David Sutton takes the title of his book from George Orwell’s essay “The art of Donald McGill”, an analysis of British saucy seaside postcards published in 1942. Orwell argues that these ribald forms of low culture provide us with “a chorus of raspberries” in response to the noble sentiments found in the realms of high culture. While such ribaldry was once central to European culture (Orwell gestures towards Cervantes, Shakespeare and Rabelais), it has by the 1930s been increasingly marginalized, finding itself, like McGill’s postcards, exorcized to “cheap stationers’ windows” [1] . Sutton’s book attempts to retrieve British film comedy of the 1930s from a similarly marginalized position. While one third of British films made during that decade were comedies, it has nevertheless remained a very neglected field. This neglect began in the 1930s, where the critical consensus revolved around the concepts of “realism”, “nationality” and “quality”, valorising the documentary tradition over the vulgar aesthetic of popular comedy. Subsequently, the canons constructed within film history have tended to sustain this disregard. While certain forms of British film comedy, notably Ealing comedy and the Carry On series, have received critical attention, the comedies of the 1930s have not generally been among them. Sutton’s book serves as a corrective to this situation.

In setting out a theoretical model with which to explore comic texts, Sutton provides us with one of the most useful recent theoretical discussions of comedy. Rejecting the sort of approach found in Gerald Mast’s book The Comic Mind, which evaluates film comedy in terms of its ability to “achieve something that is more than simply funny” (25), Sutton turns instead to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose account of the “culture of laughter” provides us with the tools to develop a clearer understanding both of the dynamics of popular comedy, and of its relationship with higher cultural forms. In developing this discussion, Sutton notes how film comedy in the 1930s departs from the structures of classical narrative cinema, identifying in the work of George Formby, for example, a “quite alarming split which the musical numbers introduce between George’s diegetic character (the naive, girl-shy gump) and his performing extra-diegetic ‘self’ (sexually knowing, tipping frequent winks to the ‘absent’ film spectator)” (42). Such ambiguity is also a feature of the politics of comic texts, Sutton argues. While the vulgarity of popular comedy might at times enjoy a subversive edge, for example, the genres of comedy are themselves institutions within which we expect such instances of transgression to take place. In spite of its coarseness, then, the comic chorus of raspberries is ultimately contained.

Sutton proceeds to explain the prehistory of 1930s film comedy, identifying earlier examples of British film comedy, and examining the crucial influence of music-hall traditions on film, which were given a renewed importance with the advent of sound technology. His eventual survey of film comedy in the 1930s provides a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of the central concerns and key figures in the period. His discussion of working-class comedy examines “the period’s richest material and… most accomplished performers” (103), exploring not only the work of George Formby, Will Hay, Max Miller, Old Mother Riley and the Crazy Gang, but also comedians such as Leslie Fuller, Ernie Lotinga and Sydney Howard, figures who have now been largely forgotten. Sutton contrasts these performers with another group of comedians, including Jack Buchanan, Gene Gerrard, Stanley Lupino and Jack Hulbert, who offered audiences a more genteel form of comedy. Such genteelness also tended to be found in comedies which drew on West End theatrical traditions such as Aldwych farce, engendering a series of films, including the box office hit Rookery Nook in 1930, which were similarly oriented towards more middle-class forms of taste.

Sutton also turns his attention to the small but significant array of female stars who emerged in British film comedy in the 1930s. As he points out, women have tended to be marginalized within comedian comedy, but in Gracie Fields, Jessie Matthews and Cicely Courtneidge, we find three figures who each established film careers through their distinct forms of comic performance. There is still much to be done in analysing the role of women within film comedy, but Sutton’s discussion of Fields, Matthews and Courtneidge makes a valuable contribution to the field.

The final part of Sutton’s survey turns to situation comedy in the period. His analysis of Alexander Korda’s 1937 film, The Divorce of Lady X, not only contrasts it with Hollywood screwball comedy, but also allows us to reappraise Korda’s career, a career not usually associated with comedy. Sutton also provides a detailed account of Anthony Asquith’s The Lucky Number (1933), “one of the great forgotten comedies of the 1930s”(221). His attempt to retrieve the film from the shadows, to reconstruct its critical reception at the time of its release, is paradigmatic of his study as a whole. As Sutton points out, when the British film industry was placed on a war footing during the 1940s, it not only turned to the documentary tradition but also to comedians such as George Formby and Will Hay in pursuit of the war effort. If we are to understand the importance of such figures at this time, and if we are to understand the current success of British film comedy, (Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), The Full Monty (1997)), in relation to its historical antecedents, then we need to turn to those neglected periods such as the 1930s and unearth the chorus of raspberries. Sutton’s book undertakes this task with considerable aplomb.

Ben Taylor

Footnotes:

[1] George Orwell,’The Art of Donald McGill’ in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, London: Secker and Warburg, 1968. Vol. 2, p. 165.