The Rebel (1961)

Interesting facts

The Rebel is a 1961 British satirical comedy film directed by Robert Day and starring Tony Hancock. It was written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The film concerns the clash between bourgeois and bohemian cultures.

Production and themes

The film was made by Associated British Picture Corporation and distributed by Warner-Pathé (ABPC's distribution arm).

The Rebel attempts to transfer Hancock's radio and television comedy persona to the big screen, and several regular supporting cast members of Hancock's Half Hour also appeared, including John Le Mesurier, Liz Fraser and Mario Fabrizi. The since-demolished railway station used at the beginning of the film, was Bingham Road in the Croydon suburb of Addiscombe, named Fortune Green South for the film.

The theme of railway station commuters' regimentation and dress codes had been depicted before. In his 1898 work "The Return", Joseph Conrad wrote: "Their backs appeared alike—almost as if they had been wearing a uniform". Hancock told the identically-dressed existentialists that before becoming one himself, he had worn a uniform as a commuter.

In The Rebel, existentialist themes are explored by mocking Parisian intellectual life and portraying the pretensions of the English middle class. Galton and Simpson had previously satirised pseudo-intellectuals in the Hancock's Half Hour radio episode "The Poetry Society" (1959), in which Hancock attempts to imitate the style of the pretentious poets and fails, and is infuriated when his idiot friend Bill does the same and wins their enthusiasti…

The film also includes scenes parodying modern art. The scene showing Hancock splashing paint onto a canvas and riding a bike over it is a lampoon of the work of action painter William Green, while the childlike paintings of Hancock, referred to as the "infantile school" or the "shapeist school", parody the naive style.

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