1995 was an exceptionally strong year for film releases, not just in the U.S. but around the world. To give you some idea of the diversity and range, consider the following movies, some of them Oscar winners or nominees: Pulp Fiction, Ed Wood, The Madness of King George, La Haine, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Hoop Dreams, Queen Margot, Speed, Eat Drink Man Woman, The Lion King, Three Colors: Red, The Shawshank Redemption, The Lost City of Children, and Forrest Gump. An eclectic list to be sure but one of my favorite movies somehow got lost and overlooked in the mix – Peter Chelsom’s Funny Bones, which is mostly set in Blackpool, England, a popular tourist resort originally built as a vacation destination for working class families during the late 1800s.
Part of the reason for the film’s low profile among American moviegoers may have been Funny Bones’ rich and multi-layered storyline, which couldn’t be easily pigeonholed into any specific genre though it would seem to be a comedy on the surface. That was obviously a problem facing the publicists at Hollywood Pictures (a production/distribution branch of Walt Disney designed for more adult oriented films). How could a movie featuring murder, dismemberment, failed careers, family secrets, smugglers, corrupt cops and a dysfunctional father-son relationship be a comedy? It doesn’t even qualify as a black comedy though some of the humor is indeed dark. Instead, it is, in the words of Variety reviewer Leonard Klady, “a complex saga of vaudeville and shtick, pathos and absurdity.” What might have been an unwieldly mess turns out to be something surprisingly lighthearted and magical with plenty of laugh-out loud moments amid a soulful undertow of regret, disillusionment and bittersweet nostalgia.
Funny Bones was a box office hit in the U.K., a critics’ darling and a film festival favorite winning numerous prizes and accolades but it quickly disappeared in the U.S. amid the many other releases of 1995. Even the phenomenal cast and crew didn’t attract much notice, despite the fact that it included Jerry Lewis, Leslie Caron, Oliver Reed, British character actor Richard Griffiths (Withnail & I), Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers’ dance team in a cameo, cinematographer Eduardo Serra (The Wings of the Dove, Girl with a Pearl Earring), and director Peter Chelsom, who garnered international acclaim for his 1991 cult film debut, Hear My Song.
The central premise of Funny Bones features Tommy Fawkes (Oliver Platt), an aspiring comedian attempting to follow in the footsteps of his legendary father George (Jerry Lewis). On his opening night at a major Las Vegas venue with his father and mother (Ruta Lee) in attendance, Tommy proves to be a complete flop. He flees the stage and runs off to Blackpool, England, the birthplace of his father and where he spent his childhood.
Famous for its rich history of vaudeville and entertainment specialty acts, Blackpool proves to be the ideal setting for planning a career comeback. Tommy hopes to audition countless performers and comics, hoping to buy material from the best contenders. His motives may be completely mercenary but it is also an attempt to establish himself as a comedian in his own right and gain his father’s approval and respect. Given the fact that George Fawkes is such a competitive narcissist, a reconciliation seems unlikely but Tommy plows ahead, and in the process, uncovers a nasty revelation about his father’s success. He also learns that Jack Parker (Lee Evans), a wildly talented but autistic performer with a murder in his past, might be his half brother.
To reveal much more would spoil the movie’s many twists and turns as it weaves what seems to be unrelated subplots (an ancient Chinese powder with amazing rejuvenation properties, the search for a corpse with amputated hands and feet, a former vaudeville team who live under a roller coaster and impersonate ghouls in a haunted house ride) into a homogeneous whole where everything comes together in the end…but not in the traditional Hollywood way with all the loose ends tied up in a pretty bow.
The making of Funny Bones as described by the director in a DVD commentary is just as entertaining as the film itself. Chelsom, who was actually born and raised in Blackpool (where part of the movie is filmed), includes some autobiographical references in the storyline including some flashback faux-home movie footage, which was actually shot at the director’s childhood home. Funny Bones is also peppered with both obvious and subtle homages to films and pop culture which influenced Chelsom from the stateroom scene from The Marx Brothers’s A Night at the Opera and Lawrence of Arabia to the 1991 surrealistic French fantasy Delicatessen (Ticky Holgado, one of the stars of the latter film, even appears in a supporting role).
Even the movie’s soundtrack, composed by John Altman, was inspired by the eclectic orchestral compositions of the great Raymond Scott. The score also includes the imaginary use of such iconic standards as “La Mer” (sung by Charles Trenet), Ravel’s “Bolero,” Duke Ellington’s “Caravan,” and John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen.”
The screenplay for Funny Bones, which Chelsom penned with Peter Flannery, was a personal and highly unconventional project so the director was completely surprised when Disney mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg offered to bankroll it for his Hollywood Pictures division. Chelsom was even more surprised when he received an $8 million dollar budget (he was expecting $3 million). The additional money allowed him the luxury of having a 60-day production schedule (almost unheard of at the time) plus rehearsal time, the freedom to handpick his own cast and crew and no studio interference.
Chelsom partly wanted to make a film that paid tribute to Blackpool’s history and its vaudeville past and even cast some veterans from that tradition such as George Carl, a former clown and slapstick artist, who along with British radio and TV star Freddie Davies, play a former theatrical act known as the Parker Brothers. Their on-screen antics are some of movie’s many highlights. Blackpool locals were also used as extras and even some of the director’s non-actor friends like stage director Gavin Millar ended up in memorable bit parts.
The real casting coups, however, were Jerry Lewis, Leslie Caron and popular British comedian Lee Evans in his feature film debut. Lewis is not playing one of his zany, hyperactive man child characters here and is much closer to the controlling and intimidating version of himself from Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982). Oliver Platt is perfectly cast as his insecure, unfunny comedian of a son and their tense relationship comes to a head in a scathing beachside scene where George (Lewis) unloads on Tommy (Platt) with barely suppressed rage: “The thing that kills me the most is watching my own son flop time after time. What kills me is however much I spend on writers and coaches it hasn’t worked for you Tommy. Goddamnit it’s like you’re too educated to be funny…Tommy, I think there are two types of comedians. There’s a funny bones comedian and a non-funny bones comedian. They’re both funny. One is funny, the other “tells” funny and Tommy, it’s time you know and this kills me the most, but you’re neither.”
Leslie Caron, who hadn’t appeared in a major film since Louis Malle’s tragic drama Damage in 1992, was undergoing a difficult time in her life when she received the screenplay for Funny Bones (Chelsom confessed he had written the part for her). “Playing Katie Parker saw me through,” she recalled in her memoir Thank Heaven. “What divine madness runs through this film!…I appreciate the eccentricity of all the British variety artists who figure in it; I love it for the teddy-bear ingenuity of Oliver Platt and above all for the genius of Lee Evans, who plays the natural son of Jerry Lewis and of my character…Jerry Lewis kept the whole town laughing for the five days it took us to film in the Blackpool circus.”
Caron’s Katie Parker is an oasis of sanity in the eccentric surroundings and her performance has a touch of old style Hollywood glamour (her circus act as Cleopatra is wonderful) crossed with the wisdom of a show biz veteran. Lee Evans, on the other hand, is the unpredictable wild card as her son and the scene in which he performs and lip-syncs to a barrage of different radio broadcasts gives you some idea of just how brilliant Evans can be in live performances (he improvised most of his work here).
Although Evans was already a major star in the U.K. at the time, Funny Bones wasn’t a breakthrough film for him in the U.S. It did lead to significant supporting roles in other successful films like Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997), Mousehunt (1997) opposite Nathan Lane and the Farrelly Brothers’ There’s Something About Mary (1998) but, for some reason, Evans has never found that breakout role to score a major hit with American audiences. Oh well, our loss.
The other cast member that deserves a mention is Oliver Reed in a minor supporting role as Dolly Hopkins, a sinister but oddly effeminate gangster boss. Toward the end of the movie he camps it up wearing an elegant yellow caftan with his hair in a ponytail – not the way most people picture Oliver Reed! At this stage of his career he was a full-blown alcoholic and his heavy drinking and outrageous behavior often created problems on film sets. This one was no different and Chelsom later stated that Reed got drunk before his final big scene with Jerry Lewis at an airport and couldn’t be filmed. In fact, the director admitted that he ended up omitting part of the Dolly Hopkins subplot from the script along with cutting out a part originally conceived for Joanna Lumley of Absolutely Fabulous TV fame because there were already enough subplots as it was.
When Funny Bones opened in the U.S., critics were mixed in their reviews although a few praised it highly but that was nothing compared to its ecstatic reception in the U.K. Al Kennedy of The Guardian probably summed it up best when he wrote, “If you have any interest in humour at all then Funny Bones is steadfast in its exploration of every possible type of funny: funny that’s stupid, skillful, angry, delighted, intellectual, insane; funny that’s subjective, personal, insightful; funny that plays with body parts and stares at death, defies it; funny that defies life – its losses, its wounds, its despair; stolen, denied, abandoned and rediscovered funny. It’s all here.” Robin Williams even called Chelsom at his home to tell him “it was the best film about comedy ever made.”
Chelsom himself admits it is still his favorite film of the ten he has directed (Berlin, I Love You [2019] doesn’t really count because it is a collection of short sketches from thirteen different directors). Avid fans of Hear My Song and Funny Bones keep waiting for the director to return to the quirky, original work he created with those two earlier efforts but after relocating to America, Chelsom has turned out more conventional mainstream fare like Shall We Dance? (2004) with Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez, Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009), and the sci-fi romance The Space Between Us (2017). Even if Hear My Song and Funny Bones end up being the best movies of his career, at least Chelsom is able to sustain and support himself as a movie director in today’s world, unlike other gifted, idiosyncratic talents like William Richert (Winter Kills, 1979), Michael Laughlin (Strange Behavior, 1981) or Bill Gunn (Ganja & Hess, 1973), who never got a chance to make that breakthrough feature.
Funny Bones has been released on various formats since its original theatrical run but the best option for fans of the movie is the Blu-ray edition released by Kino Lorber Studio Classics in August 2017. The disc includes an insightful commentary by Peter Chelsom and an amusing featurette with Chelsom and Lee Evans on the set of Funny Bones.
Other links of interest:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2005/02/17/peter_chelsom_shall_we_dance_interview.shtml
https://www.thepictorial-list.com/interview/peter-chelsom
https://www.aru.ac.uk/graduation-and-alumni/honorary-award-holders2/lee-evans
Cinema Sojourns 