On the Beat (1962) - film review

Norman Pitkin has one ambition in life: to become a policeman, just like his dear old dad.  Unfortunately, he is too short for the job and so has to content himself with being a parking attendant at Scotland Yard.  When he loses his job after a fracas with the Chief Constable, Norman consoles himself by putting on his father’s old police uniform.  He imagines he is a real policeman and is soon pounding the streets of London, taking care to avoid bona fide members of the constabulary.  He unwittingly blows his cover when he agrees to act as referee for a children’s football game.  Once again, Norman’s dreams are shattered.  But then Fate, or more precisely, the Chief Constable offers him another chance.  Norman bears a striking resemblance to the upmarket Italian hairdresser Giulio Napolitani, whom the police suspect of being the mastermind behind a spate of jewel robberies.  By getting Norman to pose as the supposed crook, the police hope to gather evidence that will lead to his arrest.  Unfortunately, Norman lacks the one thing that Napolitani has in abundance: style...

Arguably the most entertaining of Norman Wisdom’s films, On the Beat is one of the few entries in the popular comedian’s filmography that matches up the standard set by the Ealing comedies in the previous decade.  As in The Square Peg (1959), Wisdom gets to play a dual role: his familiar everyman gump hero and the chief villain, this time an outrageously camp Italian hairdresser who was clearly the role model for virtually every British male hairdresser in the 1970s.  Once again, the challenge of playing two very different characters allowed Wisdom to demonstrate that he was far more than a great slapstick artist; he was also an accomplished actor, able to project a completely different persona as and when the role demanded it.

This was the third of six Norman Wisdom films to be directed by Robert Asher, whose best known film is the British comedy classic Make Mine Mink (1960).  Despite his obvious flair for comedy, Asher failed to live up to the success of his early films and his filmmaking career petered out shortly after his association with Norman Wisdom came to an end in the mid-60s.  On the Beat shows both Asher and Wisdom at their creative best, regaling audiences with a seemingly endless series of indescribably funny slapstick routines.  

On the Beat offers plenty of laughs but it is perhaps best remembered for one hilarious sequence that appears to have been lifted from a Keystone Kops film.  Here, an implausibly large body of police officers are drawn into a stampede chase that quickly resembles the Grand National, with constables leaping over garden hedges, fences and fish ponds in suburban London, in an attempt to catch their man.   Hysterically funny.

Another inspired touch is the opening sequence, which skilfully parodies an American gangster film, with Norman once again proving his mettle and his versatility with his portrayal of a Chandleresque tough guy.  With Norman Wisdom at his best and well-served by a decent script which, for once, avoids the kind of syrupy sentimentality that mars too many of his films, On the Beat can hardly fail to be an enjoyable romp.

© filmsdefrance.com 2010

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