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LUNATICS
"What an eccentric performance!"
As everyone knows, acting on the big screen is all about restraint. With your face in close-up the size of the average front room, what you don't do is just as important as what you do. Less is more. Well, yes, that's fine most of the time, but occasionally we find ourselves wanting more from our film actors than furrowed brows, tiny shrugs and taciturn gazes through cigarette smoke. There are only so many slow burns and muffled monosyllables we can get through before we start hankering after a bit of eye-rolling, finger-popping, diaphragm-rupturing acting with a capital A. So all fans of nuance and understatement will have to bear with us as we unashamedly run down a list of our favourite filmic fruitloops who would have scholars of subtlety covering their ears and crying "You vill please be unconscious!"
Yes, we'd love to include the great Kenneth 'Land Before Time IX' Mars for his mental Germans in Young Frankenstein and The Producers, but then we'd have to trawl the massed ranks of American ham, Nicholson and all, so we'll try and keep things within the British Isles for the sake of simplicity, and go straight to the man who couldn't walk onto the Parkinson set without doing a take-off of Mars' Franz 'two coats, one afternoon!' Liebkind, Pe'er Sellers. Not for the quietly considered Stan Laurel tribute of Chauncey Gardener, but the jabbering, distracted, manic, and again often Germanic, cameo turns in What's New, Pussycat? (sexually desperate psychiatrist in greasy Richard III wig) and The Wrong Box (acting Pete and Dud off the screen as a befuddled, cat-blotting doctor - "come in!"), the assured stupidity of Clouseau and Hrundi V 'Num Num' Bakshi, or the hash-induced silliness of Harold Fine in I Love You, Alice B Toklas. Not roles that do much to demonstrate the man's famed ability to incarnate complex characters, but he's clearly having immense fun on set (especially as a Charlie Chan clone in the much-maligned all-comers ham contest Murder By Death) and that's what we're interested in here - actors relishing the chance to go completely and unashamedly over the top.
A mention should go to Sellers' old Boulting comedy sparring partner Kenneth 'I certainly have automatic high velocity RIFLES!!!' Griffith, who, when he wasn't turning in some singular historical documentaries with his outspoken political stance and outrageous physical stance to the fore, was turning in role after role of textbook creepiness, many of which - The Shop at Sly Corner, The Assassination Bureau - are justly lauded all over, but we're more interested here in his unpraised turn in forgotten Frankie Howerd film The House in Nightmare Park, wherein Francis rolls up at a spooky mansion and is accosted, tormented and generally creeped out by the Henderson family, among them Griffith, Ray Milland and Hugh Burden, all relishing the chance to overact like crazy while Mr H does his usual indignantly bewildered, audience-aware schtick. Our Ken's nutty preacher is also the one good reason - and by heck, do you need a good 'un - to watch The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain.
Sticking with the Sellerian milieu, the sainted Milligna himself has never been less than bizarre, often when playing himself - festooned with coathangers and exotic facial accoutrements while karate chopping a hapless Richard O' Sullivan in Man About the House of course, but for sustained otherworldliness, his titular role in The Great McGonagall (now miraculously available on DVD, folks!) is hard to beat. Deranged though he undoubtedly is - reciting his awful poems with a preemptive "oooooOOOOH!", performing Shakespeare in full samurai dress, turning into Max Miller at will - compared with the rest of the film's goings-on, he somehow manages to provide an emotional centre to the thing - witness his boundless enthusiasm, undaunted by the constant jeering of his audience, and the genuine, unsentimental pathos when he finds his Balmoral invitation not what it seems. Yes, you do get that weird scene where Milligan pretends to forget his lines, but there's also that wholly convincing glint in his eyes when he launches into yet another "oooooOOOOH!" epic, and that melancholy twinkly synth ditty starts up in the background. Magic.
Which brings us rather clumsily to Scotland, and the gimlet-eyed, finger-jabbing wonder that is Hamilton's most baroque son, Nicol 'A dream to some... A NIGHTMARE TO OTHERS!!!' Williamson. The old Shakespearean's wizened wizard is, apart from the peerless photography,the sole reason why anyone should want to sit through John Boorman's turgid Arthurian epic Excalibur, but it's not just the soft-loud histrionics and the ever-shifting accent we like, but Merlin's otherworldliness signalled by occasional lapses into decidedly un-historical idioms - "Now, look, Arthur..." "Ooh, you'll have to do better than that!" Either Merlin's taking the piss out of Arthur, or Williamson's doing the same of Boorman. Or indeed himself. Either way it's great, and helps no end to distract from the thuddingly portentous speeches, interminable battle scenes and armoured humpings. Apparently Williamson and Helen 'Morgana' Mirren had fallen out with each other big time prior to production, which gives their confrontations added bite - and Williamson wins effortlessly. He's also great as Little John in Richard Lester's Robin and Marian, and of course as a cold turkey Holmes plagued by hallucinations of past cases in the de facto best piece of made-up cinematic Sherlockology, The Seven Percent Solution. And on top of that, he can sing just like Al Bowlly!
Back to Ireland, and for our money the finest on-screen eccentric who ever breathed, Peter Seamus O'Toole. Mind you, when you've made your name playing TE Lawrence, how do you follow that? His post-breakthrough, pre-Supergirl career is littered with mad roles - the magnificent (and let's face it, well-researched) alcoholic Errol Flynn-alike actor in My Favourite Year ("He's plastered!" "So are some of the finest erections in Europe!"), in What's New, Pussycat? teaching Sellers how to play cricket ("Is there any sex in it?" "Oh, no. This is a game for gentlemen, played by gentlemen." "It's sick! Sick!"), the messianic film director in The Stunt Man ("If you co-operate you'll receive a first-class ticket to Amsterdam where you can stick your finger in a dyke!") and best of all, the crackpot 14th Earl of Gurney in Peter Barnes' borderline pretentious left-wing farce The Ruling Class. It's a tremendously deranged film with a marvellous cast of eccentrics - Alistair Sim, Arthur Lowe, Graham Crowden, James Villiers, William Mervyn et al. - but O'Toole tops the lot as the unhinged Earl who rides a tricycle on his wedding night, is cured of a Messiah complex by a bizarre ritual of spiritualist ECT from the excellent Nigel 'Kremlin Letter' Green (incorporating a wrestling match with a gorilla in a top hat) only to become a stuttering wreck, then fantasise about being the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper, lead a hunting party in a rollicking version of Dem Bones, Dem Bones, and cram in at least another half-dozen roles in quick succession. It's pure showing off of course, as are all the roles listed here, but what a dull place the cinema would be without the occasional (and the word 'occasional' should really be in 72 point underlined bold italics here) rulebook-shredding, carpet-chewing, sanity-dodging slice of British ham. As O'Toole put it in My Favourite Year, "Damn you! I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!"
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