Of course Benjamin isn’t talking about a man who walks the street with a handcart full of BLTs and chip butties, but rather the type of man who historically walked the streets with advertising boards strapped to his back and front. This kind of thing.
In fact that’s a still from The Sandwich Man, a 1966 film starring Michael Bentine, who also co-wrote, and featuring a panoramic cast of British comedy troopers, Dora Bryan, Bernard Cribbins, Harry H Corbett, Diana Dors, Stanley Holloway, Wilfred Hyde White, Terry Thomas, Ron Moody, Norman Wisdom, Suzi Kendall, among many others.
Imdb describes the plot as: “A man with a sandwich-board (advert) wanders around London meeting many strange characters.”
Having now watched the film, I can tell you this isn’t a very accurate description, and it makes it sound rather more fun that it is. Yes, Michael Bentine walks the streets of London advertising the wares of a tailor on his boards, and things do happen around him, rather weary comedy routines mostly, but he tends to be just standing there watching and smirking.
It’s impossible to think of him as a flaneur, but he certainly does get around. We see him in Croydon, Piccadilly, at Tower Bridge, the London Palladium, in Surbiton, in Trafalgar Square, at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, even in Dulwich Park. Of course it’s best not to ask how he gets to all these places on foot in a single day, but that’s movie magic for you. And London does look wonderful in the film – very sixties, i.e. very modern in some sense, very old fashioned in others, both very familiar and very alien.
There aren’t many reflections on walking, flaneurism or anything else, although the wonderful John Le Mesurier makes a very brief appearance as ‘religious sandwich man’ - (and is the best thing in the film by miles if you ask me), and he tells us the sandwich man’s motto is “A fair day’s walk for a fair day’s pay ... If you’ll take the advice of an elderly sandwich man, see it all happen but never get involved … And never wander from the path of righteousness, brother.” Words to live by.
I’m not saying that The Sandwich Man is a Christmas substitute for Die Hard or It’s a Wonderful Life, but I’m glad I saw it. And as I watched I couldn’t help thinking about Anthony Newley in The Strange World of Gurney Slade – which was a short TV made six years earlier, but it feels like a much more ‘sixties’ creation than The Sandwich Man – genuinely strange and surreal, sometimes experimental, sometimes downright Theatre of the Absurd. And with a lot of walking.
