Had the great comic genius and actor Tony Hancock still been with us today he would have been 100 years old. To mark the centenary of his birth in May of last year, STUDIOCANAL will release The Rebel and The Punch and Judy Man on DVD and Blu-Ray on March 3, 2025. These two films were the only motion pictures in which Hancock had a starring role.
A troubled individual who struggled with alcoholism and depression, Tony Hancock took his own life in 1968. Watching both of these films more than six decades after their cinematic release it is difficult not to locate them in the wider context of his life, thwarted ambition, and untimely death at the age of 44.
The Rebel is a satirical comedy written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson who had already collaborated extensively with Tony Hancock on the hugely successful comedy series Hancock’s Half Hour which had initially run on BBC radio from 1954 before transferring to television.
The role taken by Hancock in The Rebel is very much a continuation of the character he had developed in Hancock’s Half Hour, that of an individual trapped in the mundane repetition of their daily existence who yearns for a better life. In The Rebel, he plays Anthony Hancock who is in a dead-end job in London as an office clerk whilst aspiring to be a great artist. He quits his job and despite his total lack of talent moves to Paris in pursuit of his dream.
With an excellent supporting cast that includes a superb George Sanders, Irene Handl, John Le Mesurier, Paul Massie, Margit Saad, and Dennis Price plus cameos from Oliver Reed, Nanette Newman, and Jean Marsh, Tony Hancock is at his brilliant, lugubrious best, achieving a perfect comedic balance between pomposity, foolishness, and self-parody.
Following its release, The Rebel enjoyed much success at the UK box office. In the United States (where it was renamed Call Me Genius), however, it flopped. It was suggested that Hancock’s quintessentially English character did not translate easily to an American audience. It had been Hancock’s great desire to succeed on the other side of the Atlantic and this failure hit him very hard.
Later that year, Tony Hancock ended his long association with Galton and Simpson, choosing instead to co-write the script for his next film The Punch and Judy Man with the British journalist, poet, and novelist Philip Oakes. Other significant changes included The Punch and Judy Man being produced in black and white as opposed to the dazzling Technicolour of The Rebel, and Hancock playing against his hitherto type in the role as puppeteer, Wally Pinner. Any social-climbing in this film is portrayed by his wife Delia (played by Sylvia Syms).
The English comedian Paul Merton – for whom Tony Hancock is an undoubted hero – says that The Punch and Judy Man should not be thought of as a comedy. He suggests it should be viewed as a portrait of life in an English seaside town in the 1960s, focusing on the fabric of personal relationships.
Whilst I would agree entirely with his latter points – the film is shot in Bognor Regis (renamed here as Piltdown) and explores, in particular, the difficult dynamic between Wally and Delia Pinner – I feel it does contain some wonderful humour, often situational but also very dark in places. Some of the comic routines as Piltdown’s 60th-anniversary illumination ceremony descends into chaos are riotously funny.
John Le Mesurier returns, this time as Charles Arthur Ford, The Sandman and Hugh Lloyd (who also appears in The Rebel) excels as Wally Pinner’s assistant, Edward Cox.
The Punch and Judy Man did not enjoy either the critical or commercial acclaim that The Rebel had achieved in this country two years earlier. And Tony Hancock’s subsequent career would never again reach the same levels of his earlier success. He became increasingly disillusioned with his career, ending in the tragic circumstances surrounding his death. But both of these films are supreme reminders of Tony Hancock’s unique talent, his exquisite timing and delivery, and his unquestionable tragi-comedic genius.
The Rebel can be bought HERE
And The Punch and Judy Man can be bought HERE
