Comics placement in Movies: The Wrong Arm of the Law

Spent part of this Saturday afternoon re-watching the 1963 British comedy The Wrong Arm of The Law. I’m sure many of our UK readers recall seeing this film many times on Christmas afternoons in the early 1970s, when I used to avidly watch any British comedy film of the late-1950s and early 1960s.

© Studio Canal. The Wrong Arm of the Law 1963

The film The Wrong Arm of the Law was one of the last films that Southsea-native Peter Sellers made in England before decamping to Hollywood, paired with Lionel Jeffries (incidentally Jeffries' brother owned a TV aerial and electronics shop in Southsea) for comic support.

Studio Canal have remastered this black & white film for blu-ray and the image really sparkles. Peter Sellers and Lionel Jeffries are on top form, and the extensive London suburb location work of various High Streets has real nostalgia value for a time of long gone streets and cars.

The film remains most famous for the high-speed car chase around Uxbridge Moor in a classic Aston Martin DB4, but this time around my eye was caught by comic books on display. 

There is a scene half-way through the film when police officers are idling the time in a control room on "No Crime" night, when the gangs of London have agreed a truce. To pass the time, they are all reading different magazines.

Take a look at this shot; what do you see? Look closely.

© Studio Canal. The Wrong Arm of the Law

Dominating the foreground is the Dell Comic Car 54 Where Are You?, issue #3, cover dated October 1962, published in the US June 14th 1962. The earliest this comic would have been on sale in the UK was at the very end of September 1962.

© Dell . Car 54, Where Are You? #3

© Dell. Car 54, Where Are You? #3 - Interior Art

Car 54, Where Are You? had aired on NBC on TV in the States from September 1961 to April 1963, but it was not until April 9th 1964 that ITV premiered the show in the UK, with the final UK transmission on 29th September 1966. The strong placement of the comic on screen would only have had relevance for US cinema-goers at the time of the films release in 1963.

The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted the 'Superman' logo on the magazine that the young lad is reading in the background. It is an unusual styling of the logo. After a bit of digging, I've concluded that the comic in question is an issue of UK comic weekly Buster, folded around to show the Superman masthead from an interior page.

According to George Shiers' "Whacky Comics" blog, Superman US newspaper strips were repurposed  in the UK in 1959 for the pages of Radio Fun, continuing right up until the title merged with Buster in 1961, at which point it continued in Buster for a further year. The panel below (credit the Whacky Comics blog) is a sample of a Superman page within Buster.

© Fleetway Comics. Scan credit to George Shiers

So we can conclude that the Buster comic (published prior to the end of 1962) and Car 54 #3 (in UK end Sept 1962) were reasonably contemporaneous, but there is a timing mystery concerning the headline of a newspaper seen on screen a few seconds later. (See below).

© Studio Canal. Headline "Ron Flowers Collapses".

The newspaper headline "Ron Flowers Collapses" refers to Wolves football (soccer) player, wing half Ron Flowers, who collapsed from 'flu during the England national team practice on 12th April 1962. It is interesting that a newspaper at least six months old was used in the filming.

I am coming to the conclusion that the scene with Car 54 and Superman were cut in at a later date for the US release of the film, and that UK Studio Canal have restored the film from a US print.

There is one final shot of an unknown comic page in this scene. I have rotated the image should any of you wish to peruse your Buster collections to identify the exact page.

© Mystery page - presumably from Buster in 1962.