The Show was doomed before it ever hit streaming. Scheduled for release in the fall of 2020, when theaters were closed, it has one of the least search-friendly titles you’ll find. The sort-of sequel to a little-seen collection of short films called Show Pieces, this full-length film was written by Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) and stars Tom Burke as a mysterious man on a mysterious quest that turns out to be far, far more mysterious than he or any of us expected. It’s weird and unbalanced and doesn’t tie everything up in a neat little bow, but it is a blast. You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.
Burke plays Fletcher Dennis, a man who travels under many pseudonyms and arrives in Northampton in search of a man named James Mitchum who, it turns out, died the night before Dennis’s arrival. Dennis is far more interested in an item that Mitchum was wearing than in the dead man himself, but his search for answers leads him to chat up a woman, Faith, who nearly died in the same hospital where Mitchum kicked it; hire a pair of preteen private investigators; talk to an amiably stupid bouncer from the nightclub where Mitchum was last seen; and eventually learn about a pair of long-dead comics who were one of the most popular acts in the UK for decades. While all this is happening, something is going on in his dreams and Faith’s, where both of them appear to be going to the same nightclub, and Dennis learns more about the item he’s searching for and the duplicitous man who’s hired him to do it.
The Show is wonderfully weird, trippy and madcap and clearly the work of a man unafraid to abide by normal plot conventions. It’s a movie better experienced than pondered, especially since several things don’t quite add up in the end – literally the end of the movie, for one – and others might make more sense if you’ve seen some of the related shorts in Show Pieces, which I have not. The film bounces gleefully across genres; when Dennis is talking to the two child detectives, the film goes black and white, and one of them narrates the action, out loud, to Dennis, as if he’s not there and it’s a noir film with a voice-over. (The two kids have the film’s best sight gag as well.) Fletcher himself is a nod to the British comic strip character Dennis the Menace, wearing the latter’s trademark jumper even though it’s an anachronism, with Burke playing the character with a perfect combination of guile and bemusement.
It’s also consistently funny, from great one-liners (“I see dead people.” Pause. “You work in a hospital.”) to running gags to visual humors and more. The dimwitted bouncer, Elton Carnaby, is the film’s best running joke; he can never seem to make up his mind – if his first answer to a question is “yes,” you can be fairly sure the actual answer is “no,” and he’ll get there eventually. Becky Cornelius (played by Ellie Bamber, who I think is going to be a huge star) lets a room to Dennis, and is about the most hilariously inept flirt you’ll ever come across. The gags don’t all land – the musician known as Herbert Sherbert, who dresses as a young Hitler, feels too obvious – but the sheer quantity of them and their placement all over the film, even in graphics and background shots (like the nod to Monty Python) make up for it. I’m pretty sure I’d catch even more of them if I watched the film a second time and paused to examine some of the flyers and newspaper headlines I didn’t see the first time through.
It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and I could see a criticism that The Show isn’t really about anything – but that’s the nature of noir, or neo-noir, or perhaps we should just call this “hysterical noir” and stop with the labels? It’s just a fun story from a fertile, peripatetic mind. And I didn’t even mention Alan Moore’s own absolutely wonderful appearance in the second half of the film, with an utterly memorable hairstyle and a whole song and dance (okay, mostly song) number. I was hooked early on when it just seemed like a neo-noir film, but the sheer imagination of it all kept me on board till the ambiguous ending. Here’s hoping Moore gets to create the follow-up series he wants to make.
Keith, There is a British Dennis the Menace, but it’s the American Dennis the Menace that wears the jumper. The British version wears a red and black striped jersey.
It’s actually a very interesting story. Both Dennis the Menace strips debuted the same week in 1951, but the two titular characters are very different. The American Dennis is a lovable little scamp who unwittingly gets into minor trouble, while the British Dennis is a mean, thuggish kid who intentionally causes more serious trouble. Both authors were content that there was no plagiarism, it was just an amazing coincidence, and both strips were published for decades.
I haven’t seen The Show, but I wonder if there might have been a reference to the British version in there as well? Do you remember anyone wearing a red and black jersey?