I Watch Films: The Rebel
TV and Radio comic Tony Hancock made the jump to the big screen with this 1961 satire about modern art. Hancock’s character, Tony Hancock, works in an office doing accounts, but really wants to be an artist. He heads to Paris and falls in with a bunch of stereotypes. The artistic scene hangs on his every word, even though he’s mostly talking rubbish, or stealing his ideas from elsewhere.
Eventually some plot kicks in; his studio-mate Paul decides to give up and get a job in London, leaving all his paintings behind. An art agent/critic, hearing about Hancock, comes to visit him, hates Hancock’s “infantile school” work but loves Paul’s. Hancock fails to explain that they’re not by him before being handed a check and having an exhibition put on.
From there he’s diverted to Monte Carlo where a rich bloke wants to buy his paintings and have his wife immortalised in a statue. The wife inevitably tries to seduce Hancock, leading him to escape to the finale where the truth of the paintings is revealed.
There’s some good jabs at the pretentiousness and arbitrariness of art, and some less good ones, and a few bits that haven’t aged well.
Watch This: It’s still funny and it’s still got something to say about art
Don’t Watch This: Most of what it has to say about art has been said better and/or funnier elsewhere
Comments