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Charters and Caldicott | |
---|---|
First appearance | The Lady Vanishes |
Last appearance | Charters and Caldicott |
Created by | Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder |
Portrayed by | Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne (1938–1943) Arthur Lowe and Ian Carmichael (1979) Robin Bailey and Michael Aldridge (1985) |
In-universe information | |
Gender | Male |
Occupation | Businessmen/Military Officers |
Religion | Christian |
Nationality | English |
Charters and Caldicott started out as two supporting characters in the 1938 Alfred Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes . The pair of cricket-obsessed characters were played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. The characters were created by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. The duo became very popular and were used as recurring characters in subsequent films and in BBC Radio productions. Charters and Caldicott have also been played by other actors, and they eventually had their own BBC television series.
In their first appearance, in the 1938 Alfred Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes, Charters and Caldicott are single minded cricket enthusiasts, whose only initial concern is to get back to England to see the last days of a Test match. They proved so popular with audiences that they returned in the Gilliat-and-Launder film Night Train to Munich (1940). They also appeared in two BBC radio serials, Crook's Tour (1941, also made into a film later that year) and Secret Mission 609 (1942).
In Crook's Tour, their names are shown entered in a hotel register as Hawtrey Charters and Sinclair Caldicott. Their last screen billing as Charters and Caldicott was in Millions Like Us (1943). They were intended to reappear in I See a Dark Stranger (1946, Launder), but Launder and Gilliat refused to give them the larger roles in the film that Radford and Wayne demanded, as befitting the high-profile actors they had then become. As a result, the actors opted out of the film and two similar but differently named characters were substituted. [1] This falling out, however, left Radford and Wayne contractually disallowed from portraying the characters under the names "Charters" and "Caldicott". [2]
Despite this, Wayne and Radford continued in the same vein, playing similar double acts in several more movies, such as Dead of Night (1945, sequence directed by Charles Crichton), A Girl in a Million (1946, Francis Searle) and Passport to Pimlico (1949, Henry Cornelius). The cricket-mad Bright and Early in It's Not Cricket (1949, Alfred Roome), are particularly similar to Charters and Caldicott.
In the first draft of Graham Greene’s screenplay for The Third Man , two Charters and Caldicott type characters called Carter and Tombs were originally intended to be in the film. [3] Carter and Tombs were to be played by Radford and Wayne but by the final draft they had been condensed into one character, Crabbit, played by Wilfred Hyde-White in the final film. [4]
In Jonathan Coe's novel Expo 58 , a pair of Foreign Office employees called Radford and Wayne appear, in a nod to Charters and Caldicott. [5]
Following are the rest of Radford and Wayne's film appearances together. Most of these movies arguably utilised Charters and Caldicott's characteristics and certainly capitalised on the popularity of the actors' partnership. The characters' names are listed with Radford's role first.
Due to the success of The Lady Vanishes, Radford and Wayne soon appeared on the London stage in the play Giving the Bride Away by Margot Neville (pseudonym for Margot Goyder and Anne Neville Joske in collaboration with Gerald Kirby). The play opened on 1 December 1939 and ran for 57 performances. [6]
As with their film appearances, Radford and Wayne appeared in various guises on radio. They were still essentially Charters and Caldicott, but with their characters renamed for rights reasons. Self-contained eight-part radio series, made roughly annually, were very popular on BBC radio at the time and they starred in the following:
In mid-production on Rogue's Gallery, Radford died suddenly of a heart attack at age 55, leaving Wayne to complete the adventure on his own.
Hammer films' 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes , cast Arthur Lowe as Charters and Ian Carmichael as Caldicott.
In 1985 they were the main characters in a BBC television series Charters and Caldicott , set in the modern day, with Michael Aldridge playing Caldicott and Robin Bailey as Charters.
The BBC's 2013 telemovie of The Lady Vanishes , was based on Ethel Lina White's novel The Wheel Spins rather than a remake of Hitchcock's film, and Charters and Caldicott are absent.
Naunton Wayne, was a Welsh character actor, born in Pontypridd, Glamorgan, Wales. He was educated at Clifton College. His name was changed by deed poll in 1933.
Passport to Pimlico is a 1949 British comedy film made by Ealing Studios and starring Stanley Holloway, Margaret Rutherford and Hermione Baddeley. It was directed by Henry Cornelius and written by T. E. B. Clarke. The story concerns the unearthing of treasure and documents that lead to a small part of Pimlico to be declared a legal part of the House of Burgundy, and therefore exempt from the post-war rationing or other bureaucratic restrictions in Britain.
Anthony Gilbert was the pen name of Lucy Beatrice Malleson, an English crime writer and a cousin of actor-screenwriter Miles Malleson. She also wrote fiction and a 1940 autobiography, Three-a-Penny, as Anne Meredith.
Dead of Night is a 1945 black and white British anthology supernatural horror film, made by Ealing Studios. The individual segments were directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer. It stars Mervyn Johns, Googie Withers, Sally Ann Howes and Michael Redgrave. The film is best remembered for the concluding story featuring Redgrave and an insane ventriloquist's malevolent dummy.
Sidney Gilliat was an English film director, producer and writer.
Frank Launder was a British writer, film director and producer, who made more than 40 films, many of them in collaboration with Sidney Gilliat.
Arthur Basil Radford was an English character actor who featured in many British films of the 1930s and 1940s.
Night Train to Munich is a 1940 British thriller film directed by Carol Reed and starring Margaret Lockwood and Rex Harrison. Written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on the 1939 short story Report on a Fugitive by Gordon Wellesley, the film is about an inventor and his daughter who are kidnapped by the Gestapo after the Nazis march into Prague in the prelude to the Second World War. A British secret service agent follows them, disguised as a senior German army officer pretending to woo the daughter over to the Nazi cause.
Jamaica Inn is a 1939 British adventure thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and adapted from Daphne du Maurier's 1936 novel of the same name. It is the first of three of du Maurier's works that Hitchcock adapted. It stars Charles Laughton and Maureen O'Hara in her first major screen role. It is the last film Hitchcock made in the United Kingdom before he moved to the United States.
William Henry Mettam "Robin" Bailey was an English actor. He was born in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.
The Lady Vanishes is a 1938 British mystery thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave. Written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, the film is about an English tourist travelling by train in continental Europe who discovers that her elderly travelling companion seems to have disappeared from the train. After her fellow passengers deny ever having seen the elderly lady, the young woman is helped by a young musicologist, the two proceeding to search the train for clues to the old lady's disappearance.
The Lady Vanishes is a 1979 British mystery comedy film directed by Anthony Page and written by George Axelrod, based on the screenplay of 1938's The Lady Vanishes by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, in turn based on Ethel Lina White's 1936 novel The Wheel Spins. The film stars Elliott Gould, Cybill Shepherd, Angela Lansbury, Herbert Lom, and Arthur Lowe and Ian Carmichael.
Millions Like Us is a 1943 British propaganda film, showing life in a wartime aircraft factory in documentary detail. It stars Patricia Roc, Gordon Jackson, Anne Crawford, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, Moore Marriott and Eric Portman.
Charters and Caldicott is a 1985 BBC mystery series featuring the characters Charters and Caldicott from the Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes updated to a 1980s setting. It comprised six 50-minute episodes broadcast on BBC1 at 9.25pm on Thursdays from 10 January to 14 February 1985.
Crook's Tour is a 1940 British comedy spy film directed by John Baxter featuring Charters and Caldicott. It is adapted from a BBC radio serial of the same name.
I See a Dark Stranger – released as The Adventuress in the United States – is a 1946 British World War II spy film with touches of light comedy, starring Deborah Kerr and Trevor Howard. It was written and produced by the team of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, with Launder directing.
Edward Black was a British film producer, best known for being head of production at Gainsborough Studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s, during which time he oversaw production of the Gainsborough melodramas. He also produced such classic films as The Lady Vanishes (1938).
It's Not Cricket is a 1949 British comedy film directed by Alfred Roome and starring Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, Susan Shaw and Maurice Denham. It was written by Gerard Bryant, Lyn Lockwood and Bernard McNabb. It is the second of two starring films for Radford and Wayne. It was one of the final films made by Gainsborough Pictures before the studio was merged into the Rank Organisation.
Gavin Muir was an American film, television, and theatre actor.
A Girl in a Million is a 1946 British comedy film. It is notable for featuring Joan Greenwood in an early starring role; and Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in their comedy double act as two cricket-obsessed Englishmen, this time called Fotheringham and Prendergast.