Cinema: Tickling with a Needle

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The Small World of Sammy Lee.

Sammy is running. He runs into a Soho strip shop, where as compere and comic he dishes the dirt to the usual dirty old men ("We take you now to the Garden of Allah—in case you'd like to do a bit of planting"). Then he runs off the stage and up to his flat, where he makes a few fast phone calls and moves a shipment of bootleg bellywash. Then he runs back to the skin parlor for the second show ("This old slag takes care of her health—if she's not in bed by eleven, she goes home"). Then he runs down the street to a jobber he knows and sells him a sack of smuggled watches. Then he runs back to the dirty old men ("The next young lady you will see started out as a fan dancer—but now she has feathered her nest"). Then he runs—

And keeps on running till he's too trottin' tired to remember what makes Sammy run. Money, of course. Sammy (Anthony Newley) is chasing the ochre and he is chasing it hard, because if he can't catch up with 300 quid before sunset, some very unpleasant people are going to catch up with him—it seems his bookie is disinclined to spiv and let spiv.

Sammy is a remake of The Merchant of Venice? Well, not quite. But its come-on is the same as Shakespeare's, and after four centuries the come-on still comes on fairly strong. Britain's Ken Hughes, who directed the picture and wrote its script, keeps Sammy running fast and running wild—his film falls flat on its face at the finish but in its maddest moments generates the glorious ungartered go of a Charlie Chase chase. What's more, Cameraman Wolfgang Suschitzky supplies some hilariously horrible glimpses of the crummy comether that passes for Sohociety. And Actor Newley (who can also be seen in Broadway's Stop the World—I Want to Get Off) is a wickedly sly young comedian who keeps the customers whooping happily—until they realize that he is tickling their ribs with a very long and rather nasty-looking needle.

Sammy, as Newley sees him, is not really a figure of fun. Take him out of Soho, he is any little man in any big city. Like a mechanical rabbit, he runs eternally from an economy that is always catching up with him toward a security that never quite arrives. Unlike a mechanical rabbit, he is terrified. Yet in his terror he finds the nobility to hope. In his terror, as a matter of fact, he finds the unmitigated gall to hope against hope that the people who see him running around in circles will think he is a wheel.