It's very rare that a film makes me genuinely happy, especially as I wasn't expecting anything from it. 'Sandwich' is a virtually forgotten comedy, full of a lovable and naive optimism, but it has dated much better than acknowledged (kitchen-sink) British classics of the era. The plot is agreeably simple, a serene 'Ulysses', as we follow a day in the life of a sandwich man, Horace Quilby, walking through London, passively plying his firm's wares, encountering a variety of eccentric locals on the way. What marks this day out from the usual routine is that Horace , a pigeon fancier, has a bird due home from a race; hopes and fears for her fuel his peregrinations.
Michael Bentine is one of the less famous Goons, and there is very little of their absurdist aesthetic here, although a sequence involving a drunken stockbroker running amok in Hyde Park points towards Monty Python. This film is less a comedy than an anthology of comedy - each new character Horace meets represents a different kind of comedy, be it verbal, situation, slapstick, farce etc. (perhaps mirroring 'Ulysses'' mode of narration). The film is packed with many famous TV and film comedians, including Terry-Thomas, Norman Wisdom and Harry H. Corbett.
This comedy can be seen as a counterpart to Patrick Keillor's 'London'. Horace is a Benjaminian flaneur, someone who has the time to ramble through the city, exploring its by-ways as well as its more famous sights. It would be understandable if any viewer switched off the film after a couple of minutes when the first characters seem to be upsetting racial stereotypes, but that would be to misunderstand the film. Every character is a stereotype, fixed in a certain place or image, except for Horace, who navigates this city and its peoples.
His freedom reveals the breadth and variety of the city, as he meets aristocrats and workers, priests and bhangra-jazz players, models and housewives, as well as traversing on land and water, or travelling in vehicles and walking. The film is all about connection, the fruitful chaos that makes up city life when different cultures, attitudes etc. collide. The film both celebrates and contains this chaos - Horace may observe and enjoy it, but he is also instrumental in repairing ruptures, and the end is a very moving celebration of a multi-cultural society, espeecially poignant in hindsight, when we remember the horrors of racism and Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' in the upcoming decade.
London has rarely looked more beautiful, not in the Swinging sense, just as a city in the sunshine, with its gorgeous parks, gleaming rivers, picturesque buildings. Like 'Ulysses' or 'Berlin - Symphony of a City', the film narrates a day in the life, in this case expressing a sense of organic wholeness. Don't come to this film for bellyaches, although the park (with a malevolent lawnmower) and river sequences are hysterical; 'Sandwich' is more of an amiable, loving poem, a time capsule of a period that probably never was.