The Rebel (US title: Call Me Genius) is a 1961 British satirical comedy film directed by Robert Day and starring Tony Hancock.

One day his boss catches him drawing faces instead of working, and he is asked to produce his ledgers, which are full of poor quality caricatures.

Back at his mid-terraced Victorian house lodgings, Tony dons his artist's smock, and resumes work on "Aphrodite at the Waterhole", a horrendous and huge sculpture.

At the port, Tony is furious, but worse is to follow: while being loaded onto a ship it bursts through the bottom of its net and is lost in the sea.

Inspired by Jim Smith, Tony sleeps on top of his wardrobe and brings a cow to live in the flat.

As Tony's reputation spreads he is visited by Sir Charles Broward, an art collector and buyer who notices and is attracted to Paul's work.

The theme of railway station commuters' regimentation and dress codes had been depicted before: in his 1898 work The Return, Conrad wrote: 'their backs appeared alike-almost as if they had been wearing a uniform'.

Also in 1952's Something Money Can't Buy, during Anthony Steel's daydreaming reverie sequence, working at the local government office.

In The Rebel, existentialist themes are explored by mocking Parisian intellectual life and portraying the pretensions of the English middle class.

[3] or whether Hancock's poor quality 'Infantilist School' artworks were actually produced as a joke by the British modernist painter, John Bratby.

[4] The Rebel's British premiere was at the Plaza Cinema in London's West End on 2 March 1961, following a screening at the Beirut Film Festival.

[6] On its release in the US, under the title Call Me Genius (retitled as there was an existing TV series with the same name), the film was not well received.

[7] A reviewer writing for the British Film Institute's Screenonline website commented: "In this film, comic rebellion places artists as the antithesis of workers and there is a kind of lazy shorthand at work that conflates artists with Paris, existentialism, angry young men, beatniks and beat poets.

[8] Galton and Simpson wrote in January 2012 that the best review they ever received was from artist Lucian Freud who reportedly described it as the best film made about modern art.

On Mrs. Crevatte seeing one of Hancock's pictures on the wall: On Mrs. Crevatte first encountering Hancock's Aphrodite at the Waterhole The abstract expressionist painting scene: A definition of Existentialism As he takes his leave of the Paris Art World at his final exhibition: Using new high definition transfer the film was released on DVD in 2019 by Network Distributing Limited.