This is a strange film. Hancock wanted to do something different and hoped he could have an international film career. It's hard to see exactly what Hancock was trying to achieve in this film. In some ways it feels like a film from earlier era. It would have sat more comfortably in the 1950s. Although there are elements of the early 1960s kitchen sink dramas. The character Hancock plays in the film, Wally Pinner, is hard to quantify. It's obviously not the same Hancock of the TV series and the film The Rebel but his performance isn't strikingly different. Hancock had carved out a career playing a deluded pompous and tragic figure. He understandably wanted to get away from that and show that there was more to him. With the character Wally I get the feeling he was trying to create a gadfly. Unfortunately the over all feeling of the film was depressing and Wally's attempts at being a local chirpy character don't really work for me. Another odd aspect of this film is the ending. Suddenly the film flips from a downbeat slightly tragic comedy to complete slapstick.
This film just didn't know what it wanted to be. It veers between being a 1950's British comedy, a 1960's kitchen sink drama, a social commentary, a downbeat gentle comedy and a slapstick without doing any of them particularly well. Part of the problem for Hancock was that the world and particularly Britain had changed enormously in a very short space of time and I doubt Hancock understood those changes. Ironically the people he had shed from his career along the way including Kenneth Williams, Sid James and his writers Galton and Simpson all went on to huge success in the 1960's.
I still like this film though and consider it an interesting part of British film history. However I'm not sure I would recommend it to a non Hancock fan.
