The Man from Over the Pond (1958)

D, Charles Crichton
Colour

Let’s be honest, there are a lot of John Wayne films. Flicking around the TV over the last bank holiday weekend, I glimpsed him constructing a bridge, running a circus and indulging in a saloon fight alongside Stewart Granger. (Saloon fights, much like death on Ingmar Bergman films, are thematically important in John Wayne’s oeuvre). All those films I skipped past, but if ‘The Man from Over the Pond’ shows up on BBC2 on a wet Sunday afternoon, please do give it the time of day.

 

John Wayne plays a former conman trying to make a new start for himself in Victorian England. Without a doubt it’s lack of reputation has to do with its similarity to the much better ‘The Quiet Man’ (and possibly because the other John Wayne in England film people recall is the substantially more violent ‘Brannigan’), but for anyone British – or who has immersed themselves in British culture – then this is a giddily surreal film. A sweet and charming English comedy with a honking great American star in the middle

 

There’s John Wayne bickering friendly with his landlady, Thora Hird; there’s him being stood a drink in the pub by Peter Sellers, before stopping to chat with a tiny Arthur Askey; here he’s playing poker with Sid James, Kenneth Connor and (briefly) Bernard Bresslaw; before romancing singer with a bad reputation, Diana Dors, who’s best friend is Joan Sims; he enjoys a  running joke with exasperated tobacconist Tony Hancock; is measured for a suit by the over the top camp pairing of Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtry; and  – in perhaps one of the most remarkable images ever committed to celluloid – he is dragged onto stage to sing and dance next to a ukulele playing George Formby.

 

It’s like a whistle-stop tour of 1950’s light entertainment, with John Wayne as your guide.

 

And that’s what I truly love about this film, all these people are not altering their act to fit into a John Wayne movie, they are doing what they do and John Wayne seems to be having a ball watching them do it. Indeed there’s a grin on his face (a slightly befuddled one, but a definite beam) when he finds himself with the over the top, swishingly unabashed, Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtry. A scene which may hold the record for the most single, double and triple entendres ever crammed into four minutes. While elsewhere there’s a real chemistry between him and Thora Hird, a warmth and bright eyed affection which maybe suggests they played together as children or flirted as teens. I’m not joking, the sparks almost seems sexual at points and one can’t help thinking that if Thora had been just that little bit better looking they could have made one of those great, sizzling on-screen partnerships. She could have replaced Janet Leigh as the love interest in ‘Jet Pilot’, or Sophia Loren in ‘Legend of the Lost’; alternatively Wayne could have wound down his career playing Wesley in ‘Last of the Summer Wine’.

What’s truly remarkable about ‘The Man From Over the Pond is that it’s taken me six paragraphs to mention that Alec Guinness is in it, playing the mark who Wayne eventually forms a friendship with. But then compared to everything else, the pairing of Alec Guinness and John Wayne is made to feel a bit run of the mill. The rest of the film is so colourful and incongruous, a bizarrely and magnificently enjoyable romp – especially in the scene where George Formby forces Wayne to speak “like a cockney does”. A watching Dick Van Dyke would have scoffed that if the chance ever arrived, he’d do a far better job.