Stop the World – I Want to Get Off

Secrets of a Windmill Girl

Just Like a Woman

Finders Keepers

March

In a dreary year for the British musical film, the filming of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse’s stage success Stop the World – I Want to Get Off probably counts as the dreariest, notwithstanding that it was assuredly the British stage musical hit of 1961; commercially, there was in that year no competitor. It was vivid with pretension, the story of one man’s life in an amalgam of song, dance, and that least urgent and most unloved of theatrical forms, mime. It declared itself allegorical and of social significance, with Newley as Littlechap, a sort of cross-breed Charlie Chaplin and Norman Wisdom, the star made up to look like an escapee from commedia dell’arte. Here was the whole of life personified by unimportant little Littlechap, enduring an unsatisfactory existence of fornication and failure before beginning to realise what kind of fool he was.

Much of Stop the World’s appeal had been visual, courtesy of Sean Kenny’s spectacularly ordinary set, a stark circus background with a group of female chorines doing for Littlechap what a Greek chorus had done for Euripides. The daring was that the show went back to theatrical basics while exhibiting bravery in what it set out to demonstrate. It was indeed something new in British musicals, which by 1961 were in a pretty deplorable state. The London and Broadway productions were notable successes, but Philip Saville’s decision to film a stage performance destroyed the spirit of it, serving up neither fish nor fowl. We seem not to know why Newley isn’t there to steer the piece into port; instead, we have his understudy and take-over Tony Tanner, a name that would have meant little to the British cinemagoer. His Evie is Millicent Martin, never associated with the stage version.