Review of A Coming-Out Party

Although Stanley Baxter was principally known as an impressionist he was more versatile than the run-of-the-mill mimic.He had the actor's ability to assume a full personality rather than merely copy a voice or a look.In "Very Important Person" he plays a Scottish POW and his German captor,the latter role being perhaps the more challenging. Since the early 1950s there had been a whole sub-genre of war films featuring resourceful Brit POWs outwitting the plodding German prison guards and making plucky attempts at freedom.At one time there were so many chirpy cockneys digging tunnels that there were hardly enough left to stoke the boilers or peel the spuds. Normally the Germans were amazingly sanguine about it all,being sportsmen,but when the decidedly unsporting SS became involved things rapidly changed ."The Great Escape" marked the end of the "POW as naughty schoolboy" cycle of movies with its cold-blooded slaughter of dozens of unarmed British officers.That this film is a Christmas perennial says something rather disturbing about the British psyche - or the BBC.Rather daringly the Escape comedy was revived a few years later by American TV with "Hogan's Heroes". In 1961 we were just about on the cusp.Our boys were not having it all their own way - the Germans were clamping down - no more Herr Nice Guy. So when the wonderful James Robertson Justice is shot down and imprisoned under a false identity effecting his escape is going to require a bit of thought. Fortunately the Escape Committee,comprising a comforting number of British actors with experience in other POW movies is able to get him out so he can get on with his hush-hush war work back in Blighty. That is the bare bones of the plot,but the pleasures in "Very Important Person" are in the writing and the performances.It dates from the time when British movies were still made with craft and care and the audience able to recognise intelligence and wit in a screenplay without a laughtrack to tell them.Nobody thought they were making "Citizen Kane",but they took pride in what they were doing and the finished product is joined-up comedy film-making. 1960 saw the birth of the British Satire Movement - "Private Eye" began its existence,"Beyond the Fringe" opened in Edinburgh and soon the floodgates would open to a tide of Oxbridge men and women queueing up to be very rude to politicians and Royalty and be very handsomely paid for doing it - well it was more fun than working in a Merchant Bank I suppose.In some respects "Very Important Person " is a last hurrah for quality British comedy before OUDS or "Footlights" got their clever-clever cold-hearted hands on it. It was funny in 1961 and it is funny today.Far funnier than some onanist in a college scarf imitating Harold Macmillan.I think it's fair to say that Messrs Justice,Baxter,le Mesurier et al will be remembered with far more affection long after all the satirists have gone to that big JCR in the sky.