jameselliot-1 Review of The Small World of Sammy Lee

The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963)

What kind of fool is Sammy Lee? Spoiler warning

[8/10 · 18 April 2021]

Movies about Soho and its libidinous night life in the 1950s and '60s attracted both British filmmakers and German producers of Edgar Wallace mysteries. Beat Girl aka Wild For Kicks, Secrets of a Windmill Girl, Street Girls, Expresso Bongo, Phantom of Soho, and this long-neglected gem, Ken Hughes' The Small World of Sammy Lee starring Anthony Newley and a group of terrific character actors. It failed at the boxoffice in spite of the popularity of kitchen-sink movies at the time and has the kind of title that gives the impression it's a movie made for children. Centered around the Peepshow club and its MC Sammy, a loser of his own making, a neurotic, hyperactive, degenerate, masochistic gambler who has 5 hours to pay off a 300 pound horse racing debt to gangsters (the always excellent Kenneth J. Warren and his apprentice Clive Bowler). He races around Soho or yammers into the phone at supersonic speed trying to tap family (his brother and sister-in-law), friends and neighbors for money, making deals, sending his dresser to make deals and sell some of his possessions. Newley's very good but his manic Sammy becomes grating. He's a nervous little man in a cheap room, the kind of man Mickey Rooney played often. And a Freudian psychiatrist's dream patient. One of his phone contacts wants to buy an antique chair in his flat but he won't sell it because his mother "died in that chair." In reality, the club doesn't doesn't need a comic-MC. A off-stage announcer with a microphone could simply bring on the next dance number. Cliches and stereotypes abound: The slick club manager (Robert Stephens looking like a Little Italy guido) who curiously takes dealing with Sammy's constant tardiness and callous behavior in stride, even when Sammy slugs him in the face. Sweet-faced, young innocent Julia Foster shows up at the club for a job. Sammy took her virginity in her town awhile back and now she arrives with a suitcase to get a job she thinks he promised her. The manager hires her as a server first after checking out her body in his office. Sammy's brother is the classic Yiddish deli owner. (Their real name is Leeman.) and the Soho merchant Sammy tries to dump a box of watches also has a thick Yiddish accent. His black friend is a jazz musician. The dancers are all icy girls and kept as background players with no focus on them. Sammy is indifferent to them backstage. For a tiny club, that backstage is big enough for the Rockettes. His dresser is an old geezer with an unjustified loyalty who runs around collecting Sammy's money from his deals. The street corner newspaper vendor is a dwarf. Sammy's neighbor is a 30-something incall-prostitute with a crush on Sammy and offers to give him the cash but he indifferently brushes her off, yelling that he's not a ponce, Brit slang for either a pimp or a gay male. At 107 minutes, Small World is too long and could have used some trimming. The razor sharp cinematography of Wolfgang Suschitzky is extraordinary and the on-location shooting of the Soho streets teeming with life and litter is brilliant. The clarity, focus and lighting make modern, expensive movies look like so much garbage. Overall, it's a highly recommended film although it goes off the rails at the close and makes no sense. Having made a fistful of cash from all of his shady deals, Sammy doesn't pay off the gangsters and is about to leave on a bus with Julia Foster when he doesn't board the bus and goes with the enforcers in their car, as if he wants to be punished or murdered. "What kind of fool am I?" indeed. Warren beats him to a disfigured pulp in a violent junk yard assault but inexplicably throws the cash on him and leaves him on the ground, even though Sammy whacked him over the head from behind with a pipe. No gangster would ever do that. It would have been a better ending to either fade to black when Sammy walks over to the gangsters or simply escape with the girl. Did this movie inspire John Cassavetes when he wrote The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie?