Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget

Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?

What’s Good for the Goose

Oh! What a Lovely War

Goodbye Mr Chips

January

Almost certainly worthy of an award for the most unmemorable title of any British musical film since the beginning of sound, Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? is nevertheless one of the most interesting and daring. Whatever its qualities or lack of them, it cannot be criticised for its lack of originality if considered as a British musical film, but how original is it as a work per se? Not very. Newley’s theatrical apprenticeship involved his participation in John Cranko’s somewhat surrealist entertainment Cranks (1955), which experimented with varying degrees of success with the genre of intimate revue. An art form that has been more or less dormant since the 1960s, Cranko’s distinctive material must have had its effect on Newley’s development as writer and performer. Introspection featured largely in Cranks, and has been no inconsiderable part of Newley’s subsequent work. In partnership with Leslie Bricusse, his excursions into musical theatre thrived on it. Not only was Newley the writer and sole male performer of their 1961 stage musical Stop the World – I Want to Get Off; he seemed to throw the mirror of life back on himself throughout it. This was musical self-flagellation at its most intense. This autobiographical formula was used again for the next on-stage Newley-Bricusse stage musical, The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd and subsequently for The Good Old Bad Old Days. It is not accidental that the central figure of each of these was in effect Newley himself, a self-obsession that continued in, and was magnified by, the adventures of Mr Merkin in the complex and sometimes baffling screenplay by Newley and Herman Raucher.

Critics threw bouquets and brickbats. In the New York Times Vincent Canby reported that in this debut ‘as an all-purpose movie man he so over extends and overexposes himself that the movie comes to look like an act of professional suicide … as self-indulgent as a burp’. For Roger Ebert ‘the film is critic-proof […] The result may be more of a juggling feat than a directorial triumph, but it’s a good act while it’s on stage.