The Rebel/ The Punch and Judy Man (12) Home Ents Review

Can you be uncharismatic and enigmatic, depressive but profoundly watchable? The legacy of British comedy legend Tony Hancock suggests that you can, and the two feature films based around his comic persona constitute the epitome of postwar, lower-middle-class British weirdness. 

In The Rebel, Hancock plays an insurance clerk from London who leaves his boring office job and travels to Paris to become an artist on the Left Bank. He has no talent but his work is mistaken for that of his flatmate and he becomes a darling of the art world. 

The satire is all rather obvious. There are a couple of nice visual gags and the sparring between Hancock and his London landlady (Handl) is almost funny. The narrative push to get Hancock to ‘do the right thing’ keeps the film on comic tracks but it is the possibility of derailment that intrigues. 

Derailment is suggested by Hancock’s character itself – his character remains absolutely odd, the further we get in time away from his era. Hancock’s comic persona is uncharismatic but smug, arch and dissatisfied, an enigma, perhaps a void, or at least little more than a collection of resentments and prejudices that somehow manages to stay appealing.  

This subtlety of character is deployed to much greater effect in The Punch and Judy Man, which comes across like a British version of a De Sica neo-realist movie.   

Punch and Judy puppeteer Wally Pinner (Hancock) is just about making a living in the faded seaside town of Piltdown. Wally’s wife Delia (Syms) keeps the pair afloat with her gift-shop, but Wally is annoyed by her social pretensions. Things come to a head when Delia gets Wally invited to perform at the town’s anniversary gala reception. 

The Punch and Judy Man is one of the strangest films I’ve seen in a long time. You would consider it bittersweet, even gentle comedy, but that doesn’t quite capture the depressive tone, the feeling of barely managed decline about the whole film. It isn’t nostalgia, it isn’t regret, it feels like the film is taking one step at a time, working through a real-life crap situation as it goes along. 

This tone is obviously intentional and resolutely anti-gag. There are several scenes in which you expect a gag to be worked through and nothing of the sort happens. A mix up with chairs in the climactic scene is a case in point: you keep on expecting someone to sit on a chair that is no longer there, because this is a comedy film, right? 

Instead, all you get are some embarrassed looks at the chair and other people from Hancock – I assume he is embarrassed partly because he is half expected to turn this into a slapstick moment. 

The film is like one long dying fall that undercuts your expectations over and over again. I don’t know if this is still comedy, but it is brilliant whatever it is.  

The Rebel/ The Punch and Judy Man is out on Blu-ray and DVD from 3 March 2025.