There’s lots to like about The Small World of Sammy Lee: Anthony Newley’s weaselly charm in the title role; the seedy 1960s Soho streets; the Night-and-the-City flourishes; the rare glimpse of the bickering family life of British Jews; the haunting soundtrack. Having lurked for several decades in the shadows of British cinema, the 1963 film is finally emerging into the sunlight of 4K restoration, festival screenings and Blu-ray release.
It’s a genuine curiosity: the last knockings of black-and-white, beat-influenced hipster cinema before a tide of gaudily-coloured, new wave-inspired, pop art films. Ken Hughes, its director, reached back to the prewar working-class bohemianism so perfectly captured by Graham Greene and Gerald Kersh.
Newley’s Lee is your archetypal two-bit hustler, a strip-club compere on the hook for gambling debts to the local heavy. Trotting wearily around the Soho streets in search of cash, Lee more than anything resembles a low-rent British answer to the Sammy Glick of What Makes Sammy Run?, Budd Schulberg’s influential 1941 novel. As is customary in these kind of stories, Lee also has a girl: Patsy, played by Julia Foster, a fresh-off-the-train northerner who ends up tearfully shimmying on stage at The Peep Show.
At the time, Newley was desperate to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor, rather than a song-and-dance man: in what was an in-joke between him and Hughes, one scene features him shouting for “Oscar” – his cat. Sammy Lee came along just as his stage career was exploding: Newley fitted the filming in between the successful West End run of Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, the musical he wrote with Leslie Bricusse, and its even more successful Broadway run. Newley had already acted in a string of films, mostly light comedies, though he had played the Artful Dodger in David Lean’s Oliver Twist while still in his teens. What’s more, he had the still-outré TV comedy The Strange World of Gurney Slade under his belt, with its metatextual, fourth-wall-breaking oddness. Newley’s on-set anxieties were apparently increased by the fixed presence of his then-girlfriend Joan Collins. According to Foster, she was there to prevent Newley’s eyes straying. They would marry a year later. According to Newley’s biographer Garth Bardsley, Hughes and Newley thought they were making an “important” film, “the Look Back in Anger of London’s Soho, perhaps”.
But it didn’t turn out that way. More a melancholic noir thriller than an assault on the class system, Newley and Hughes’ film – originally called The Small Sad World of Sammy Lee – didn’t really fit into the kitchen sink era and the angry generation of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. There were no awards, or sobbing critical attention, or much in the way of box office returns.
Hughes, who was a prolific director throughout the 1950s and 60s, has perhaps, like the film, suffered from neglect. He remains best known for the Sunday afternoon family yarn Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which was by far his biggest commercial success, but one he confessed to have disliked making. “It made a lot of money,” he said later, “but that doesn’t really make me feel any better about it.”
According to his daughter Melinda, who has kept the family’s artistic impulses alive through a career in opera and satirical cabaret, Hughes was something of a hipster as a young man, with a fondness for jazz and lowlife Soho bars. What’s more, she says, she spotted a random clip of her father guzzling a glass of beer in Julien Temple’s 2012 collage-documentary London: The Modern Babylon. It turns out this was culled from footage Hughes shot himself, while attached to the RAF film unit during the second world war, which is now held in the Imperial War Museum archive.
Hughes was, says his daughter, fascinated by Jews and Jewish culture, although he wasn’t Jewish himself. (Nor, contrary to occasional veiled suggestions, was Newley, who despite looking and acting the part, had only a single Jewish grandparent.) Still, The Small World is one of the few overt attempts to put British Jewish life on screen: Hughes devises a great scene in which a desperate Lee attempts to borrow money off his hardworking brother Lou, a Whitechapel deli owner played by Warren Mitchell. Their long-dormant sibling connection is finessed by the arrival of Lou’s suspicious, princessy wife, Milly (The Rag Trade’s Miriam Karlin), who swiftly senses Sammy’s predicament and heartlessly turns him out. It’s a brilliant cameo of a moment that rings thoroughly true.
Melinda says her father’s career declined after he moved to Hollywood in the wake of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, just when the Hollywood new wave were taking things in a new direction. His penultimate film was the notorious 1978 Mae West flop Sextette. He died in Los Angeles in 2001.
The rerelease of The Small World, however, may herald an upturn in his reputation. Studiocanal, the company behind the restoration, who own the rights for large numbers of 50s and 60s British films after acquiring part of Rank’s back catalogue, regard it as “something of an undiscovered gem”. At last, it would seem, Sammy Lee – and Ken Hughes – can get their moment in the spotlight.
• The Small World of Sammy Lee screens on 15 November at JW3, London as part of the Jewish film festival. It is released on 14 November on Blu-ray
