Comedian Sid Field (1904-1950) was the king of the West End in the mid-1940s. An entire generation of comics – from Spike Milligan to Tony Hancock – was influenced by his gallery of absurd and lovable characters. But he’s a forgotten figure now. His fame was fleeting. He was a superstar for just 6 years. His reputation rested on a series of huge variety shows at the Prince of Wales Theatre between 1943 and 1947, but he appeared in only 3 movies. The first of which was called “That’s The Ticket”, released in November 1940.
It’s a mystery to me how a competent provincial comedian, but no star, not yet, would be handed the lead in a Warner Brothers comedy-thriller. Albeit a quota-quickie pastiche of Hitchcock movies like “The 39 Steps” where an ordinary citizen meets a femme fatale and gets caught up in a deadly game of espionage. “That’s the Ticket” was made in 3 weeks in Teddington Studios and involves Sid and Hal Walters as nightclub cloakroom attendants being co-opted by the secret service on the trail of what Alfred Hitchcock would call a “Maguffin”: a missing top hat containing secret blueprints.
But nobody bought tickets. And it’s been pretty unviewable since 1940, with no video release. I tracked a print down at the BFI and watched it on a moviola. It deserves better. Paul Merton has called it “a major work by a major artist” and while it’s no classic Sid and Hal make a fantastic double act. It spoofs the genre very entertainingly with daring disguises and ending with a cream cake fight. Sid is more of the straight man here, the more suave Chesney Allen-type to Hal’s Bud Flanagan (who even affects a Bud-like speech impediment). I’d like to speculate it was a rejected much older script for the Crazy Gang duo, because it’s weirdly set before the war in a Paris free from Nazis. Director Redd Davies had also helmed Flanagan and Allen’s “Underneath the Arches” just a couple of years before. At a time when Charlie Chaplin and George Formby were making movies lampooning Hitler it seems oddly naïve, so perhaps that’s why it flopped.
Sadly the delightful Hal Walters was killed in the Blitz a few weeks before it was released. Ending any prospect for more Walters and Field movies. Two years later Sid Field would pair up with the debonair Jerry Desmonde, forging a double-act that would take London by storm.
