Steptoe & Son (1972)

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Did you people see the same film I saw?

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

The seventies marked the beginning of a long, slow decline for the British film industry, a sorry state of affairs that continues to this day. The once-proud Hammer studios, which had once flooded both the domestic and overseas markets with a steady supply of richly atmospheric horror films, had unwisely branched out into cheapskate big-screen spin-offs of previously popular sitcoms. The mighty Rank studios merged with Xerox, a company better known for making photocopiers, and the legendary EMI shortly followed suit, merging with Thorn, a company that manufactured light bulbs and fire extinguishers. Curiously enough, this sudden and irreversible decline in the fortunes of the heavy hitters paved the way for a short-lived golden age of British exploitation cinema, with the likes of Pete Walker and Norman J. Warren pushing the envelope in terms of gory violence and soft core sex as far as they dare under the baleful gaze of the censor, and fly- by-night operators churning out endless variations on the tried-and- tested Carry On formula with the added attractions of simulated sex, full-frontal nudity and scores of familiar faces from the television looking mightily embarrassed in cameo roles. Which brings us to the first of two big-screen outings for England's favourite rag and bone men, the inimitable Albert Steptoe and his long- suffering son Harold. Steptoe and Son first made their mark at the BBC back in 1962 in a one-off Comedy Playhouse instalment called the Offer; the episode made such an impact that the BBC commissioned a full series shortly thereafter. Between 1962 and 1965, there were four series of Steptoe and Son before the series' creators, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, decided they'd exhausted its possibilities and moved on to pastures new. However, the characters of Harold and Albert were too good to be left to the tender mercies of the public's brief attention span, so a further four series were commissioned between 1970 and 1974, this time in glorious colour (though, true to form, only about half of the colour episodes actually exist in this format; the rest were wiped and the only copies left in the BBC archives are off-air black and white video recordings). The first Steptoe and Son film premiered in the same year as the seventh television series, regarded by many fans as the high watermark of the entire run, thanks to memorable episodes like 'Men of Letters', 'Divided we Stand', 'Oh What a Beautiful Mourning' and 'the Desperate Hours', so expectations for the feature were understandably high.Unfortunately, what cinema audiences got was a crude, half-hearted piece of work, long on bathos but painfully short on comedy, with a more-than-usually neutered and psychologically crippled Harold, a far less sympathetic Albert and a non-starter of a central plot in which Harold marries a stripper named Zita. As you might expect, the first half-hour or so of the film doesn't stray too far from the series' origins, and it also contains many of the film's stingy quota of highlights - most notoriously, Albert taking a bath in the kitchen sink. The scenes in the football team's social club offer a convincingly seedy glimpse of a long vanished world, and the scene where Harold and Zita meet for the first time is nicely played and actually rather touching. After this, though, repetition and coarseness begin to set in, and the screenplay contains more padding than a cheap settee - the endlessly delayed wedding and the doomed honeymoon in Spain (something of a missed opportunity, since effectively all that happens is that Albert succumbs to food poisoning, ruins his son's wedding and has to be returned home - whereupon he naturally makes a speedy recovery) find the supply of laughs slowly drying up, and by the time the film reaches the halfway mark all but the staunchest Steptoe fans will be feeling bewildered and cheated by the sudden gearshift into unsubtle maudlin sentimentality from which the film never really recovers. Some scenes feel more like a precursor to the reliably depressing EastEnders than a lighthearted (if gritty) situation comedy.Technically, the film is pretty shoddy also, with poorly recorded sound, some shocking dubbing - particularly during Mike Reid's stand-up routine, where the audience laughter seems to be coming from a different room entirely - and some very iffy continuity to contend with. Cliff Owen's direction is functional at best, though as other critics have noted, the scene in which Harold is beaten up in a rugby club has a horribly botched, half-finished feel to it, hardly helped by the sad fact that such an incident was horribly misjudged in the first place - genuine violence or malice seldom made it into the Steptoe world on television. Luckily, Galton and Simpson were offered a second chance at transferring their iconic characters to the cinema with 1973's Steptoe and Son Ride Again, a far superior film which manages to keep the laughs coming throughout and feels more faithful to the series as a result.

In the TV series, Steptoe and Son always played with the audiences empathy. Old man Steptoe was a horrible man, but this was redeemed by the ludicrousness of his acts. Harold was naive and pretentious but because he was a rag and bone man nobody took him seriously. In this film someone does take Harold seriously and Steptoe is generally just horrible. The actors play their roles with their usual gusto, but the underlying love between Steptoe & his son that sustained the TV series is replaced here by something far less wholesome and more akin to psychological and emotional abuse. Cliff Owen (Director) had either never seen the series, or in this instance was incapable of capturing the subtlety and nuance that great comedy depends upon. Every gag is wrung dry and instead of pathos you get squalor. The TV series is and will remain a great example of British comedy, this film is not.

Let me start by saying how much I love the TV series. Despite the tragic nature of a middle-aged man seemingly unable to pursue his dreams because of his overbearing, manipulative father, it was incredibly light-hearted and fun to watch in practice. In my opinion, it is without doubt one of the greatest British sitcoms of all time. The TV series has my 10 out of 10 rating without reservation.This movie spin-off on the other hand is a true tragedy in every sense of the word. Hardly any of the essence of the TV show is transferred successfully onto film. This movie has a very dreary, depressing tone that almost moved me to tears on several occasions. Seeing Harold being beaten up in a pub (and not in a comical way) is not my idea of comedy but is most definitely one reason why fans of the TV series will not like this movie. The movie was painfully unfunny except for the scene where Albert bathes in the sink and is seen by a neighbour.The romance between Harold and Zita is completely out of tone and it makes me wonder whether the producers of this movie ever bothered to watch the TV series. In the TV series, Harold always went after respectable girls, not strippers.Albert's reactions to the remarks made against him by Harold's girlfriends were absolutely priceless in the TV series. In the movie, Albert says virtually nothing when such an opportunity rises.Most movie spin-offs of British sitcoms tend to be quite dull, with the notable exception of the ON THE BUSES films (which in some respects were actually better than the TV series itself!). But, STEPTOE AND SON has to rank right at the very bottom of the pile, even below GEORGE AND MILDRED.My advice - skip this one and see the second spin-off, STEPTOE AND SON RIDE AGAIN instead. It has a much lighter tone, is more faithful to the TV series, and is actually very funny.

"Women? They're all scrubbers...!" No, not a good translation; not at all! This lags behind the previous year's "Dad's Army", entirely missing the special, small-screen magic of the seminal television sitcom original, and failing to play interestingly at all with the big screen... you could just about say that this film well represents a Britain entering decline, and more precisely even than that, a *British film industry* entering decline. And that is hardly a recommendation, is it? To be an exemplar of saddening folly...All that remains after the subtlety of the TV original has been surgically stripped away, by Cliff Owen, Galton and Simpson are: endless, dilapidated musical cues, yawn, from the Ron Grainer theme... bolstered sentimentality (that shoddy, thick-eared ending... how much bolder does the second Steptoe film seem in comparison) an increased seediness - with director and writers seemingly detaching themselves completely - fully applicable to something like the 'misbegotten monstrosity' (yours truly on this site) from 1973, "The Mutations". There is a strangely botched, cut-adrift tone about the scene where Harold is beaten up in a rugby club, that I partly hate and recoil it (so far, as a friend intimated, from the mood of the TV series...), but this at least seems an original slant, and emblematic of tensions just rising to the boil in the Britain of 1972... There is, however, an implied prostitute, aye of a 'heart-of-gold' who turns loose woman-traitor 'pon poor auld 'Arold - and beyond-caricature writing of the 'class' element; not to mention, surprisingly misjudged performances from the usually redoubtable leads. Brambell and Corbett collude with the script, and indeed fail to cure it of an essential ham. What would Anthony Aloysius Hancock have made of it all...? I will merely concede that a few moments just about work - chiefly those where G & S play things a little more carefully and B & C touch tenderer nerves - and it is not on the whole an unwatchable affair. But, and oh, how this pains me to say it: it is tiresome, boring, both wilfully detached from reality and what made the TV series great, and also fully in tune with the lazy, tawdry, misogynist 'fuck it, that'll do...' actuality of much of what was allowed to pass for mainstream film-making in the Britain of the time.