- Today’s Movie: Tommy the Toreador
- Year of Release: 1959
- Stars: Tommy Steele, Janet Munro, Sidney James
- Director: John Paddy Carstairs
This movie is not on my list of essential films.
Today’s installment of Sports Analogies Hidden In Classic Movies is just one of many contributions to a event called the 100 Years of Kenneth Williams Blog-a-Thon being hosted by The Wonderful World of Cinema. She’s very intelligent, complete with a advanced degree in some sort of big-brained filmy stuff. That’s why she conjures up great ideas like this event.
But the real reason I’m glad she’s hosting this blog-a-thon runs a little deeper than that. It may brand me as an old weirdo, but all such conceptions come from a kernel of truth. We all remember our first love, but how many of you film bloggers remember your first blog-a-thon?
I didn’t even know what a blog-a-thon was until I met Virginie. Thanks to her hosting just such an event for William Holden, this hybrid “sports” begged her to allow me to join. I even explained the point behind my series adding that if she wasn’t interest, I would understand. But like the prototypical nervous high-school boy asking for a date, I had that “over-joyed” moment when she said “yes.”
I had already created the series Sports Analogies Hidden In Classic Movies, because as an old weirdo, I’ve never cared about stats. Dubsism exists as a creative outlet sparing my gray matter from the cerebral death of corporate America. But acceptance from a group of people who actually get into old movies? That’s why Virginie will always be my first “blog-a-thon” love <giggle>.
My affections aside, the fact you’re here means you share her same interest in an eclectic collection of views on classic cinema. More importantly, there’s so many great contributors to this event that if you miss out, that’s on you.
The Story:
The first thing you will notice about this episode is the absence of the traditional trailer. That’s the risk you run when you write about British movies of nearly seven decades’ vintage. Instead, that’s a clip from CBS’ Ed Sullivan Show featuring Tommy Steele in 1965.
Steele is known as the United Kingdom’s first “Rock and Roll” star. It’s no accident the timeline of Steele’s early career ascent basically mirrors that of Elvis Presley; they were riding the same “Rock and Roll” rocket. He’s actually best described as a de facto B-Movie British Elvis with a dash of Fred Astaire. In America, Elvis became “The King.” But in the U.K., Tommy Steele is known as Sir Thomas Hicks…having been knighted in 2020.
To that end, every Elvis movie had a cast of familiar faces to give it gravitas. Enter Kenneth Williams, the very subject of this blog-a-thon. Williams lends his in a far too short appearance as the authoritarian British Vice-Consul. If you’re hopelessly American like me, think Neville Brand in Elvis’ Love Me Tender and you’re pretty close.
Keep most of the “Elvis” genre in mind, and the rest of Tommy the Toreador will also feel familiar. As such, the plot in this musical comedy is almost inconsequential when stacked up against it’s functional role escorting the viewer to various reasons for Tommy to sing. There’s about a half-dozen of them; the signature number being Little White Bull.
Not only would it be rude not to discuss the plot, it would be silly since in this case it’s painfully easy. Steele plays a sailor who while ashore in Spain comes to the aid of a bullfighter. Add some good, old-fashioned mistaken identity, and we get Tommy the Toreador in the ring with a ton of angry T-bones on the hoof.
Along the way, there’s the aforementioned half-dozen rocked-up showtunes serving as mileposts marking the journey through Steele’s inoffensive yet ever-present hamminess.
We musn’t overlook the formulaic romance Tommy and Amanda (played by Janet Munro), an English girl fed up of working as a dancer in a Spanish night club. Between that and the other shenanigans, everything in this film is engineered for Steele to use his all of his scenery-chewing charisma to distract from the exceptionally feeble storyline.
But again, like an Elvis movie, you’re not there for Academy Award winning performances. You’re there for some easy entertainment, and as long as you don’t forget that, you can find this movie enjoyable.
The Hidden Sports Analogy:
Compared to the game of today, American football of the 1950’s was a smorgasbord of violence. What else could you expect from a violent game played by violent men who just spent years modernizing and perfecting violence to win the Second World War? Things that would get you kicked out of a National Football League (NFL) game today were standard operating procedure 70 years ago. But for children of the 1980’s like myself, the jovial, crew-cut wearing Art Donovan became the face of that era thanks to his appearances on the David Letterman show.
A story-teller of the first order, Donovan’s book Fatso became a veritable encyclopedia for his tales of the NFL when it looked less like a game and more like a slightly more organized version of a Viking ransacking.
Donovan had the blue-bloodiest of pedigrees for athletics and violence, He was the son of legendary boxing referee Arthur Donovan Sr., and the grandson of “Professor” Mike Donovan, the world middleweight boxing champion in the 1870s.
Art’s athletic career began at Mount Saint Michael Academy in Bronx, NY. His prowess on the football field earned him a scholarship to Notre Dame in 1942, but with the outbreak of the Second World War, Donovan left school to enlist in the United States Marine Corps, where he served in the Pacific taking part in the battles of Luzon and Iwo Jima.
After the war, Donovan resumed his football career at Boston College, eventually joining the NFL’s Baltimore Colts. This is where the Art Donovan came into his own. Part of becoming a celebrated raconteur is having stories worth telling. Having stories means having lived them, and there was no better place for that than Donovan’s “old days” of the NFL.
Another part of story-telling is when you get to combine two things that normally don’t go together. Jim Brown also plays a role in Hollywood history. Not only did Brown manage to trade the gridiron for the big screen, he was also one of the first athletes to transition to acting as a career. The football star amassed over 50 credits on his way to being regarded as Hollywood’s first black action hero.
But when Brown’s path crossed that of Art Donovan, one of Fatso’s best stories was born…and one which shares a theme with Tommy the Toreador… mistaken identity.
Often a subject of his story-telling, Donovan usually referred to Brown as the greatest football player whoever lived. But he also described the experience tackling the Cleveland Browns’ icon as “like hitting a building.”
During a Colts-Browns game in 1962, Jim Brown was doing Jim Brown things…namely steam-rolling Colts defenders. During half-time Donovan, his fellow Hall of Famer Gino Marchetti, and future professional wrestler Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb hatched a plot to enact a bit of “street justice.” To be more accurate, the troika of Colts planned to beat the bejeezus out of Brown at the bottom of a post-tackle pile; the goal being to knock Brown out of the game. But our three conspirators failed to notice Cleveland’s coach had taken Brown out of the game the play before they hatched their plot.
This is where the “mistaken identity” part kicks in. Tommy the Toreador…meet Charley Scales.
Scales played for the Cleveland Browns in from 1962 to 1966. More importantly, clad in football gear, he resembled Jim Brown; they were both around 6’2″, 220-ish pounds, and black. In the heat of the moment, Scales looked enough like Jim Brown for the three Colts to execute their plan. Of course, Scales knew such attention had to be reserved for the guy who had been running over the Colts all day long. But the three Colts got in their shots all while Scales kept screaming “I’M NOT BROWN! I’M NOT BROWN!”
The Moral of the Story:
It doesn’t matter whether your a bullfighter or a football player…target confirmation matters.
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