In our non-stop media age it’s hard to imagine films languishing forgotten. Everything exists at once now, history a time-line we can traverse at will. Everything of value (and much that isn’t) is being championed somewhere as we speak, as the desire for new stimuli grows, for new old things, rediscovered gems, lost classics. How is it possible for a film to remain hidden, a mere rumour, the preserve of dedicated nerds, lovers of the willfully obscure? Even cave paintings are exposed to prying eyes these days, reproduced on t-shirts and mugs. What could escape the voracious, interactive maw of our multi-mediated culture?
Well, nothing probably. But things can certainly still fly under the radar. Take, for example, the case of Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against The Eunuchs, the first film produced by The Beatles’ George Harrison. I recently came across a scene from this film, this corduroy exchange, and it stopped me in my tracks. How could something so good have never crossed my path? Surely I’d have heard of it at least, a film with a Beatles connection starring stalwarts of British cinema like John Hurt and David Warner? It was a complete mystery to me. I had to investigate.
What I discovered was a darkly comic political allegory based on David Halliwell’s acclaimed 1965 play which marries kitchen sink Northern locations (we’re in Oldham) to word-driven scenes of heightened theatricality. Which is to say it doesn’t try to normalise the play, but uses the camera to intensify scenes, to revel in language and the glorious opportunities for actors to take off into spellbinding monologues. It could have fallen between two stools but manages to achieve a convincing symbiosis between play and film, a third way. Somehow the locations, superbly captured by John Alcott (A Clockwork Orange), with their wintry drabness, isolated plots of land, high-ceilinged bedsits, industrial red-brick grime, all-pervading misty dampness, anchor the characters, allowing them to breathe and exist as both real and political allegory. They’re the kind of misfits places like this breed, men driven crazy by the never-starting futility of their existences, dreamers, idealists, fantasists, but also blowhards and inadequates, comical in their self-deluded bragging and schemes, their determination to force themselves into the flow of history.
We first see Malcolm Scrawdyke in his dour flat trying to make himself get out of bed, to trick his mind into moving, act before thinking. (It’s like everything that follows is the result of this desire to act, to avoid the sheer boredom and inertia of his life). We soon learn he’s been expelled from Art College for being a disruptive influence. He takes two of his loyal followers, Wick (John McEnery) and Erwin (Raymond Platt) to the pub where they plot their revenge not just on the art college tutor they despise but on the whole country. Malcolm considers himself a leader, a militant revolutionary, and sees his expulsion as an opportunity to put into action what they’ve often spoken about, a political movement, hilariously named Dynamic Erection.
They bring in Dennis Charles Nipple (David Warner), a duffle-coat-wearing would-be writer, a rival to Malcolm in his argumentativeness and his ability to use language. They rehearse kidnapping their nemesis, stealing a painting, practicing speeches and how to deal with assassination attempts, all the while seeming like overgrown children at play. This is a point it’s making of course. So much revolutionary talk and posturing is just that, fantasy and play, childish in essence, and just as threatening or likely to succeed. Malcolm is like a militant Billy Liar, Lancashire rooftops echoing to the cheers of imaginary crowds as he prepares his rousing speech. He’s the leader because he’s the most eloquent, knows the tricks of oratory, the emphatic hand gestures. But behind all the talk of action, the railing against the eunuchs, he’s just as impotent and ‘little’ as the rest of them.
And yet, despite all this, we kind of like these deluded malcontents. They’re in a fine line of British losers railing impotently against their lot from Hancock to Steptoe and Son. In fact only three years after Little Malcolm, the sit-com Citizen Smith would mine a similar seam, making comic hay from the gap between revolutionary ideals and the mundane reality of British life. But beneath the comic sympathy runs a warning about taking these things for granted. The parallel is with Hitler (an art-school reject too of course) and the Nazis. A joke in 1920s Germany, little men acting big, until the political geography altered and they seized power. Then it wasn’t funny anymore. And so it is here. As Little Malcolm progresses we see how censorship and bullying evolve from the words, from the refusal to see any other reality but their own. They’re dreamers but cowards too, socially and sexually inadequate fantasists unable to access or deal with reality.
Despite winning the Silver Bear at the 1974 Berlin Film Festival Little Malcolm quickly disappeared from view, only to be resurrected by the BFI in 2011. Yet echoes of it can be found in other films like sarky misanthropic Johnny in Mike Leigh’s Naked (Leigh directed the first stage production of Little Malcolm), Withnail and I for the comic verve of the dialogue and even Chris Morris’s inept terrorists in Four Lions. Yes it’s a filmed play but when the dialogue is this good it doesn’t matter and the acting is sensational. Warner has rarely been better and there’s fine support from everyone, including Rosalind Ayres as Malcolm’s girlfriend. But this is Hurt’s film, one of his greatest performances. When Malcolm gives his would-be speech to the massed ranks of snowy Oldham rooftops Hurt launches into an oratorical tour-de-force while at the same time hand gestures and passionate emphasis of words are pitched just too much, making them ridiculous. The way he bellows ‘seeeeeeize the init-i-a-tive‘ is both thrilling and hilarious. Little Malcome then, ripe for rediscovery, may be a film who’s time is our troubled now.