‘Unfailing ability to cheer me up': why The Rebel is my feelgood movie

The Guardian

07-04-2025

For me, memorable and/or uplifting film experiences tend to be around individual moments – the resurrection scene in The Matrix for example, or Dizzy's 'I got to have you' in Starship Troopers. (Do either really hold a candle to Mel Brooks's A Little Piece of Poland number in the To Be Or Not to Be remake? The jury is still out.) But without wanting to sound like either a retro bore or a they-don't-make-'em-like-they-used-to fuddy-duddy, I turn to Tony Hancock's yuk-heavy feature vehicle from 1961 for its unfailing ability to cheer me up.
I think I must have first watched it in the 1980s on TV, after my dad solemnly recited one of the film's great moments, when Hancock offers a hunk of cheese to a blue-lipsticked beatnik Nanette Newman and says, with a sort of slack-jawed terror: 'You do eat food?' Newman, as it happens, is perhaps The Rebel's most amazing sight: otherwise known as the apparently-prim English star of the first Stepford Wives movie, a middlebrow popular-culture staple in the UK for her washing-up liquid TV commercials, she is tricked out here in a fantastic exi get-up – dead-white face paint, Nefertiti eyeliner, lank copper-coloured hairdo – at almost the exact same moment in time that the Beatles were being talked into ditching their teddy boy quiff.
The Rebel in fact is stuffed with great moments: Hancock's opposite-platform ruse to get a seat on a packed commuter train (no longer even theoretically possible, sadly); Hancock appalling waitress Liz Fraser by refusing 'frothy' coffee; Oliver Reed glowering in a Parisian cafe as he argues about art, of all things; and Hancock's epic action-painting sequence complete with bicycle and cow. And of course, the chef's kiss: the exquisite moment when connoisseur critic George Sanders chortles dismissively about Hancock's 'infantile school' picture of a foot ('Who painted that – the cow?')
US readers might know the film as Call Me Genius, as that reportedly was the title it was released under there, but quite possibly they won't know it at all; Hancock, acclaimed in Britain, never made headway in Hollywood or on US TV. But the alternative title is actually as accurate a summary of the film as the original one; although the script (by Hancock confreres Galton and Simpson) appears to mock the pretensions of the art world, its target is really the delusional nature of Hancock's Walter Mitty-ish office drone, who ends up back in his suburban bedsit after a meteoric rise and fall in Paris's avant-garde circles.
It's a character that draws fully on the persona that Hancock had made his own over the preceding decade: the intellectually ambitious but unfailingly thwarted nobody, hanging on like grim death for better times around the corner but fatalistically resigned to submergence in a tidal wave of mediocrity. I can't think of any equivalent in the US; Hancock is, I sense, far too defeated and self-pitying a figure ever to command a giant audience. George Costanza is probably the closest, but Hancock has little of Costanza's frenzied self-hate.
Well, there is something rather wonderful about seeing Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock in full and living colour, operating at the height of his powers, the man who his writers described as 'the best comic actor in the business'. And of course the film is a wonderful portal to a vanished world, a net-curtained Britain just on the cusp of its transformation by 60s pop culture. Lucian Freud called The Rebel the best film ever made about modern art; well, he should know, but for me it's more than that – there's an extra joy in remembering the hours I spent tittering at it with Dad as we lolled on the three-piece suite back in my gormless teenage years. If anything makes me feel good, it's that.