The Small World of Sammy Lee

There’s a comic undertone, sometimes subtle and other times overt, in Ken Hughes’ The Small World of Sammy Lee: this quality is largely situated in the face of leading man Anthony Newley, which projects a combination of desperation and exasperation throughout the film, even his final utterance a kind of laugh-sob while he’s covered in blood in a pit of mud. Newley plays the title character, an emcee (or compere, as the Brits say) at a gentlemen’s club where an old friend, Patsy (Julia Foster), has just arrived to begin work as a stripper. In debt to impatient bookies for 300 quid, Sammy is given until 7:00pm to come up with cash, which triggers an odyssey across SoHo to cobble together favors and loans from his contacts, including his brother Lou (Warren Mitchell) whose assistance is thwarted by his tyrannical wife Milly (a deliciously mean Miriam Karlin). As the deadline looms, Sammy becomes more panicked, perhaps becoming over-reliant on his older friend Harry (Wilfrid Brambell) and tempted to sell his most important possession: the antique chair in which his mother died. An adaptation of the director’s own television play and featuring a jazzy score with snare drums, guitar, and flute, the film brilliantly brings to vivid life the early 1960’s era of London’s SoHo neighborhood, opening with early morning trash collection on the empty street in front of the peep show and a dwarf selling newspapers.