There is a kind of English comedy, hugely popular in the 1930s, that seems grimly alien to us now. George Formby, Arthur Askey, Gracie Fields, Jessie Matthews and others were massive stars then, but their films were just extensions of their music hall acts, with the sketch-like frames of poor verbal play, cosy ideology, silly accents and bumbling slapstick stretched out into a narrative format, which only further lays bare their datedness.
One could argue that the same went for the Marx Brothers, with one crucial difference. They were funny. And inventive. Two crucial differences. For a truly innovative use of the music hall ethos, one must look to Hitchcock's English films. It's hard to believe that these Victorian relics were being made at the same time as sophisticated modernist masterpieces like BRINGING UP BABY. Nowadays they are cheap fodder for the likes of Paul Whitehouse.
There is one exception to all this, Will Hay, who remains as peerlessly funny today as he did in his Hayday (sorry). Well, I think so: my wife walked out after ten minutes. Why has he survived? His films are slightly better constructed than those of his peers, with director Varnel not content with simply filming theatre. But the plots consist of the same sketch-like format, with Hay and his two cronies, Graham Moffatt and Moore Marriot, both acting as characters in a comedy, and grandstanding to a perceived music hall audience. Much of the comedy seems similar and faded too, as to be almost cosily familiar.
I think there are two reasons why Hay survives so well. One is the Hay persona. Usually playing authority figures - policemen, schoolteachers, railway station managers etc. - he created a character that had an element of WC Fields misanthropy laced with an ineptness, a seediness, a megalomania, a greed, a desire to evade duty and yet reap as many rewards as possible, an underlying selfish contempt, and, most importantly, a freedom from sentimentality, that is strikingly modern. He doesn't sing for his supper like Formby, he doesn't try to ingratiate: he is often grotesque and unpleasant, indifferent to what we think; but he has a literal, almost honest, expedience that makes him oddly endearing.
The power of this persona, and the second reason for his continued immortality, is that it can act as a weopon of satire on two fronts. Firstly on the characters he plays. Here, as the title suggests, he is a policeman, in a sleepy English village which has an astonishing crime-free record for the past ten years. This is due less to vigilant law enforcement than the fact that Hay ignores crime and that he and his men are involved in all kinds of petty illegalities themselves. The film opens with a dire warning of widespread crime in England, and it seems we're in for a conservative picture, but the locus of criminality here is with the law.
The second kind of subversion is practised by these corrupt policemen. The peace and well-being of any society depends on the efficiency of its police force, whose success becomes a mirror of stability. The distorted mirror offered here reflects a topsy-turvy world where nothing is what is seems. There is much play in the film with mirrors and signs, with uniforms and social statuses shown to be arbitrary constructions - local aristocrats are ruthless smugglers etc. The credit sequence emphasises this, and the policemen are constantly rearranging signs, destroying the stability of society for their own ends (see the brilliant traffic-speeding episode).
These are inept, simple-minded policemen, and to dominate their plot, they have to make the world in their own crazy image, as shown in the remarkable chase finale, which results in the astonishing sight of a packed bus chasing a smuggling truck on an operative racing track. Yet even success here for the policemen does not result in normality and resolution - their ineptness and greed has totally unpended notions of law and order, and they become caught in a circular hell of their own making.
POLICEMAN is a wonderful comedy, directed with surprising imagination. The plot is a direct rip-off of Hay's masterpiece, OH! MR PORTER, with dozy professionals outwitting the supernatural and smuggling. The Headless Horseman here is much more frightening than anything in SLEEPY HOLLOW, and the kickstarting of a ghost story element into a hitherto casual plot is very effective. There is some lovely satire of the BBC's pretensions to being the voice of Britain, its metropolitan patronising of yokels and its contrivance of 'reality'.
The immortal trio are at their narrow-minded best, performing a deceptively varied range of comedy - from slapstick to farce to CARRY ON-style doubles entendres - with practiced, thrilling ease. I'd love to know how this kind of comedy translates to America - the absurdity, proto-deconstruction, daft high-pitched voices and elaborate set-pieces would leave a surprising imprint on the mighty MONTY PYTHON.
