Recently I ranked and reviewed all the Ealing Comedies, a group of eighteen Comedy films released by Ealing between 1947 and 1957. It is these films that ensured that the name of Ealing became synonymous with comedy but they were preceded by another group of Ealing Comedy films that were once just as beloved but have now faded from the memories of most. These are the star vehicles for popular entertainers of the day: Gracie Fields, George Formby, Tommy Trinder and Will Hay. All of these comedians came up through the music halls, perfecting their acts on stage before discovering ways to approximate that same appeal on film. In this article, I have ranked and reviewed every Ealing film by those aforementioned entertainers.
29. Bitter Springs
Bitter Springs doesn’t really belong on this list as it is not a Comedy. While the same could be said of other films I have included, such as Sally in Our Alley, The Foreman Went to France and The Bells Go Down, those films were all Comedy-Dramas in which the comedic elements were smoothly incorporated. Bitter Springs, by contrast, is plainly a grim Drama onto which Tommy Trinder has been awkwardly nailed in order to add comedy relief. A dreadful relic from the late era of Ealing in which they began making films in Australia, Bitter Springs is based on a story by its director Ralph Smart and follows an Australian family’s 600 mile trek to a piece of land they have leased from the Government. As it transpires, the land houses a water source on which the indigenous people rely, resulting in a clash between the First Nations people and the new settlers, particularly the bigoted patriarch.
As one might imagine, the racial politics here are muddy, blurring the line between examinations of prejudice and the thing itself. The production was troubled, with input from numerous sources leading to creative disagreements and the mistreatment of First Nations people on set (with none of them receiving credit in the final film, even Henry Murdoch who plays a pivotal role as the unfortunately named Blackjack). The story was originally intended to end with the slaughter of all the First Nations people but this was changed to a scene of inadequate compromise which, while obviously more palatable, is far from convincing. Whichever way the film had chosen to go, it’s hard to imagine who thought Bitter Springs was crying out for a music hall entertainer to balance out its tone. There is no place for comedy here and Trinder, despite receiving top billing, feels out of place as the out-of-work magician who accompanies the family on their journey. It’s an unfortunate ending to Trinder’s largely impressive career with Ealing.
28. Fiddlers Three
Fiddlers Three is nominally a sequel to Tommy Trinder’s Ealing debut Sailors Three, insomuch as Trinder plays a character with the same name and profession, and the film’s title has the same structure. There are, however, several important differences. Sailors Three was a wartime adventure set in the real world, whereas Fiddlers Three is a fantasy involving time travel. Sailors Three had only a couple of songs bookending its story, whereas Fiddlers Three is a full-blown Musical with regular songs throughout. And, of course, Sailors Three was actually good, whereas Fiddlers Three… well, you get the idea.
Fiddlers Three can easily be viewed independently from its predecessor. Trinder is the only returning cast members and there are no references at all to the events or characters of the earlier film. In fact, in order for Trinder’s Tommy Taylor to have a romance with Frances Day, you have to assume that he ballsed up the relationship he forged with Carla Lehmann in Sailors Three. That’s not too much of a leap, given the fickle seafaring stereotype he plays in both films, but it does rather go against the rogue-refining happy ending Sailors Three worked towards. Still, implied broken homes are hardly the worst thing about Fiddlers Three. This story of two sailors and a WREN (a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service) being flung back in time by a lightning storm at Stone Henge is utterly flimsy.
The majority of Fiddlers Three takes place in Ancient Rome but no expense has been incurred in creating this illusion. Still, when the material basically amounts to a series of very poor sketches, the full opulence of Roman architecture might’ve made an inappropriate backdrop, although it would at least have given audiences something to look at instead of watching Trinder do his Carmen Miranda drag act. After his appearances in wonderful films like The Bells Go Down and Champagne Charlie, Fiddlers Three feels like a significant backwards stumble for Trinder and his performance is noticeably weaker. The majority of the cast are adequate at best and terrible at worst, with only Francis L. Sullivan’s preening Nero and Frances Day’s Poppaea standing out as performances it looks like the actors are enjoying. Day gets by far the film’s best moment with her solo performance of the lively song Caesar’s Wife but sadly it’s a very short highlight in a very long 80 plus minutes.
27. This Week of Grace
Gracie Fields’ third film, This Week of Grace was long thought to be lost until a copy was located in 2010. Since then, there have been several uncharitable reviews suggesting that it would’ve been better off remaining lost. While it’s wonderful that the film was rediscovered, This Week of Grace is definitely a step down from Gracie’s first couple of pictures. Based around a contrived, messy plot that sees the working class Gracie installed as housekeeper at the estate of a wealthy duchess, the film is not without its charms. Once again, Gracie is never less than amusing, although this time round she is saddled with a family of Lancastrian oddballs in an attempt to maximise the culture clash comedy of the scenario. Sadly, it has the opposite effect, especially with Douglas Wakefield’s bizarre performance as the brother which often just comes across as disturbing. The plot meanders along, its lacklustre romance extended beyond its natural life through tedious misunderstandings. There’s a Pygmalion style transformation moment in which Gracie receives an education through an utterly uncompelling montage in which we see nothing but changing calendar pages to represent ten months work. Its scrappy corner-cutting is indicative of This Week of Grace’s overall ragbag quality.
Thankfully, the Pygmalion process does nothing to change our Gracie’s character and she remains the one thing keeping this film alive. She gets a handful of enjoyable songs courtesy of Harry Parr Davies, notably My Lucky Day and the infectious Happy Ending, and also performs an amusing send-up of an operatic aria. The film far outstays its welcome at 92 minutes but these interludes stop it becoming interminable. Ultimately, though not a good film, This Week of Grace is further evidence of the power of Gracie’s charisma, which ensures the film remains watchable at the very worst, although its themes of bridging the gap between the classes could have been far be interesting in the hands of better writers.
26. Love, Life and Laughter
Gracie Fields’ fourth film reunites her with director Maurice Elvey for the third and final time and, like their previous collaboration This Week of Grace, it plays on class differences as she is romanced by the Prince of Granau, a visiting royal who is betrothed to a Princess who he does not love. Despite, or perhaps because of, their obvious differences, the Prince and the publican’s daughter fall for each other, but their attempts to escape the encroaching shadow of royal responsibility can only last so long. The most interesting thing about Love, Life and Laughter is its comparatively downbeat ending. For the first time Gracie doesn’t get her man, stepping aside to focus instead on the children’s charities for whom she raises money. The point of this ending is hard to pin down. In her previous outing, Gracie married the toff and bridged the gap between classes, but here there’s a hint of reverence for upper class pageantry that you feel Gracie really ought to be razzing. Perhaps that is the point, as our heroine narrowly escaped becoming part of it all and instead focuses on her more important dedication to those in need. Or maybe there’s no real point beyond the simple fairy tale lightness of it all and we should just enjoy that. Although the airiness of the whole thing might make this a tempting conclusion, the solemnity with which royal duty is treated in some scenes suggests otherwise.
While its muddled ideology is less satisfying than the class-transcending idealism of its predecessor, Love, Life and Laughter improves on This Week of Grace in many ways. Its more straightforward plot, though basically unsatisfying, at least feels less forced and while Gracie is once again given a family here, they are wisely kept in the background rather than shoved into the spotlight where they can be a constant distraction from the star turn. The major problem shared by both films is the determination to place Gracie straight into glamorous surroundings. Obviously the hope is to draw comedy from the juxtaposition but trading the working class settings of her earlier films for the escapist fantasies of royal functions robs these latter films of their authenticity and simple charm. This Week of Grace was promoted as “Cinderella in modern dress” and Love, Life and Laughter seems to be shooting for exactly the same thing. Once again, Gracie is saddled with a dull leading man (John Loder, who, to be fair, doesn’t have much of a part to work with) and this time the plot shackles her to him for extended amounts of time. It’s clear from an amusing early scene in which Gracie faces off with a baffled judge that she is at her best when relieved of a romantic screen partner. Once the Prince becomes a major part of the story, the chances for fun are extinguished.
The songs go some way to lifting Love, Life and Laughter, in particular the title theme which opens and closes the film in rousing style. The comedic Out in the Cold, Cold Snow is also fun, delivered during a rare spell when Gracie isn’t stuck to the Prince. But ultimately the weak plot and screenplay are a little too dominant to fully overcome. Gracie is still as engaging as ever but the overwhelming impression at this point in her career is that she needs better material to supplement her natural charm and screen presence.
25. I See Ice
Following the excellent George Formby film Keep Fit, Ealing put together many of the same creative team for the follow up I See Ice, including stars Formby and Kay Walsh, director/screenwriter Anthony Kimmins and producer Basil Dean. Unfortunately, the resulting film wasn’t a patch on its predecessor, or even up to the standard of Formby’s earlier Ealing efforts. The problem here is that the plot never really comes together. Keep Fit stayed focused on its themes of sport and exercise, deriving set-pieces and musical numbers naturally from that topic. But I See Ice splits its story between ice skating interludes and the story of George’s new invention of a hidden camera, which leads to a case of accidental blackmail. Throw in the fact that George also spends the film on the run from the police for pulling an emergency cord on a train and you have entirely too much going on. The culmination of the latter plot, in which George ends up in jail, seems to be there just to allow him to sing the prison-themed Mother What’ll I Do Now?, a good song shackled to an unnecessary narrative diversion. Formby also performs the classic In My Little Snapshot Album and the abysmal romantic ballad Noughts and Crosses, as painfully twee a composition as he ever recorded. It’s just a shame that the song Sitting on the Ice in the Ice Rink had already been squandered in Formby’s pre-Ealing debut Boots! Boots!, as it would’ve be ideally suited here and wouldn’t have derailed the plot.
Perhaps the reason I See Ice spends so much time evading its central concept is that ice skating just doesn’t have the same comedy potential as a motorcycle race or boxing match. At best, you’re going to get a bit of slapstick slipping around and that’s largely what the skating scenes entail. There’s one slightly more inventive moment in which George gets his fake beard stuck to the ice and ends up frozen to the floor in the middle of a skating couple’s routine, but this is largely a weak venue for comedic invention. While still watchable enough, it’s hard to stay focused on I See Ice when it slides so abruptly between haphazardly arranged plot points. One of Formby’s few Ealing misfires.
24. The Black Sheep of Whitehall
The Black Sheep of Whitehall is notable for being one of only three films on which Will Hay took a co-director credit. It is also notable for being the first directorial credit for the great British director Basil Dearden. However, despite having another screenplay by the great Ealing writers John Dighton and Angus McPhail, the film itself isn’t terribly effective. In general, Hay’s comedy is at its best when it is based around dialogue, character and performance, as in the one standout scene here where Hay’s incompetent professor is mistaken for a political expert and attempts to improvise a radio broadcast that is so baffling it leads to the mental collapse of his interviewer. But The Black Sheep of Whitehall quickly moves towards a much sillier plot involving Hay trying to foil fifth columnists by donning a series of elaborate disguises. The situations are increasingly silly and over the top, collapsing into a jumble of broad skits. The finale, a chase scene in which Hay is attached to the back of a car in a wheelchair, is often cited as a highlight but is a bit tedious and overlong, and fails to play to Hay’s strengths. Though a bit of slapstick and silliness was always part of Hay’s films, the best are those that just let Hay be Hay. The Black Sheep of Whitehall seems to spend a lot of its runtime trying to do just the opposite.
23. Look Up and Laugh
In many of her films, Gracie Fields was cast as a modern Cinderella, plucked from working class obscurity by a dignitary or showbiz impresario. But by the time of her sixth film, Look Up and Laugh, she had become more like the Fairy Godmother, coming into people’s lives, solving their problems and then disappearing into the sunset, her only reward being the satisfaction of standing for what is right. This assertive fixer was exactly the kind of hero that Depression era audiences needed. While the escapism of a Cinderella fantasy provided an eighty minute distraction, the adventures of Gracie the socialist organiser provided a real sense of hope.
With its story of a group of small store owners taking on the big corporation that wants to demolish the market where they ply their trades, Look Up and Laugh was Gracie’s most politically charged film yet. It is unsurprising then to see that the screenplay was written by prominent socialist author J.B. Priestley. With its sit-ins and group singalongs, and with Gracie’s fierce determination to stand up for the little people, Look Up and Laugh is quite a rousing experience. It is, however, also a film that is showing its age in terms of entertainment value. Maybe it’s the cumulative effect of my having watched six Gracie Fields films in the space of a week but Look Up and Laugh felt somehow more strained. For the first time I felt like Gracie’s performance was a bit overstated, as if she was trying hard to sell her northern charm rather than just letting it naturally captivate. The material itself doesn’t help, obviously struggling to find outlets for punchlines and hijinks in the comparatively bland market setting. Still, there’s just about enough to keep Look Up and Laugh going throughout its slender runtime. Cinema buffs will be interested to see a young Vivien Leigh in a small supporting role, and there are the usual collection of catchy songs by stalwart of the Gracie films, Harry Parr Davies. There’s a nice detail in with the protesters at the sit-in can be heard singing some past hits from Gracie’s previous films too.
In all honesty, I spent much of Look Up and Laugh wishing I could enjoy it as much as I supported its politics but it is by no means a bad film. And in the final sequence, director Basil Dean has concocted the best of Gracie’s self-sacrificial finales. While previous films like Love, Life and Laughter and Sing As We Go saw Gracie shaking off romantic disappointment with a resilient, full-throated chorus of the title tune, Look Up and Laugh sees her attempting to do the same. But while in previous films Gracie surrounded herself with supporters for a triumphant finale, here she is alone in a car, driving away from those she has helped. Although she throws herself into the performance, there are noticeable wobbles as she muses on the resonance of certain lyrics. And as she gets further away, the orchestration gets more sparing until all we hear is Gracie’s voice, a lonely solo as she disappears into the distance. It’s a fantastic climax.
22. Spare a Copper
Released the same year as another of his war-themed films Let George Do It!, Spare a Copper saw George taking on saboteurs at a Merseyside dockyard. Although it shared the wartime setting with its predecessor, as well as a couple of screenwriters in Basil Dearden and Austin Melford, Spare a Copper doesn’t have half the invention or narrative cohesiveness of Let George Do It! Instead, it falls back on the much-used style of loosely connected skits which eventually cohere into a finale of some kind. Unfortunately, Spare a Copper doesn’t seem to have a well-mapped route and it meanders a little during its first half. The romance with Dorothy Hyson seems crowbarred in and she appears to be half asleep throughout which, given the feeble material she is given, can hardly be held against her. The details of the saboteurs’ plot are delivered in half-whispered bits of exposition between comedic scenes which fail to hold the attention enough to impart the necessary information. There’s a reasonably exciting car chase, with George driving a motorised toy miniature, but even that collapses into a messy tag involving a Wall of Death ride which doesn’t work at all.
Spare a Copper is one of those films that I’d describe as neither good nor bad. It passes the time well enough but it never engages, which is a key failing in an aspiring Thriller like this. Elements of Formby films that are usually assured compensations also fail here. The four songs are largely below par, with On the Beat feeling like a weaker rewrite of It’s in the Air and I’m Shy falling foul of a tweeness that scuppers many of Formby’s romantic numbers. I Wish I Was Back on the Farm is a more traditional Formby song but its plodding pace has always prevented it from becoming a favourite, while Ukulele Man is the clear highlight, a tailor-made signature tune for Formby which is slightly tainted by an accompanying sequence featuring a group of precocious children. Another problem the like of which I’ve never encountered before in a Formby film is that George himself feels somehow less likeable here. When he first appears, far from the scrappy but eager hero in waiting, he feels like a pushy, overzealous jerk, using his newly acquired status as a War Reserve police officer to unnecessarily commandeer vehicles, before ditching his duties the minute he takes an interest in Hyson. He also asks her out almost immediately and with a new level of confidence that seems odd for George, especially in a film featuring a song called I’m Shy. Of course, Formby was nominally playing a different character in every film but those adjusted surnames were fooling no-one. At the risk of displaying the overly-prescriptive indignation of an entitled fanboy, this doesn’t feel like our George!
Although Spare a Copper was a hit, audiences had already begun to tire of war films and George would only return to the genre sporadically. His final film for Ealing would return to the domestic concerns of the earlier Feather Your Nest. Formby had proved himself as a capable and convincing hero in the traditional sense with Let George Do It! but the flaccid Spare a Copper cast doubt on how sustainable that image really was for the Lancashire lad.
21. Turned Out Nice Again
During 1940, George Formby had been playing the war hero, scuppering spies and squashing saboteurs in Let George Do It! and Spare a Copper. But, successful as those films were, by 1941 audiences were already growing tired of War films. So for his final Ealing outing, Formby was returned to the domestic setting he’d last inhabited in Feather Your Nest back in 1937. Breaking from the standard Formby formula, Turned Out Nice Again eschewed high stakes adventure in favour of proto-sitcom family dynamics and once-risqué jokes about underwear. Rather than having to win the girl, Formby marries her in the opening minutes, and then has to deal with the clash between his new bride and his monstrously domineering mother, all while trying to make his name in the world of undergarment manufacturing. There’s a certain air of desperation in Ealing finally making a film named after Formby’s most famous catchphrase, as if they have to make his presence blatantly clear while also trying to remind people what they loved about him in the first place. That’s not true, of course, as Formby was still the top star in Britain at the time of this film’s release, but as a full stop on his Ealing career and the beginning of his largely downward trajectory at Columbia Pictures, there’s a feeling of vague melancholy about Turned Out Nice Again that always colours my viewing experience.
There is, of course, more than just historical context that makes Turned Out Nice Again a below-par Formby film. While it is interesting to glimpse the 40s family dynamic and, to some extent, see the dominance of the male “head of the family” be subverted by Peggy Bryan’s clearly more assertive and independent Lydia, there’s also an odd sourness to seeing George driven to the brink of divorce by his own manipulative mother. Though we’d heard the famous “Oooh Mother” referred to in every Formby vehicle, we’d rarely seen any flesh and blood representation of her. The last time had been in Formby’s Ealing debut No Limit, in which she was a supportive and helpful character. But here, Mother is a monster, her sociopathic attempts to keep George all to herself at the expense of his happiness foreshadowing terrible parents of British sitcom like Albert Steptoe or Phyllis Lumsden in Sorry! Although it’s partially the point, I’ve always found these domineering parental dynamics to be difficult to watch, and I spent a great deal of Turned Out Nice Again wanting to put my foot through the screen whenever Elliott Mason started faking one of her funny turns. Mason plays the part of the villainous mother well, perhaps a little too well for my liking!
While it’s not one of my favourite Formby vehicles, there’s plenty to enjoy in Turned Out Nice Again. Bryan is an enjoyably formidable foil which is refreshing given how marginalised many of the Formby heroines were, and there are some good songs here too. My favourite stretch of the action is where George goes away to a trade show and this is where he performs the two best songs in the film, the ode to big, stretchy pants You Can’t Go Wrong in These and the tremendous showstopper The Emperor of Lancashire. The film also contains one of Formby’s most famous songs, Auntie Maggie’s Remedy, but it is so unceremoniously rammed into proceedings, performed on a bus with zero build up or justification, that it takes the shine off it a bit and exposes Turned Out Nice Again’s slightly ramshackle feel. While the sitcom vibe is agreeable enough and there’s a small surge of tension towards the end, the film feels flat in comparison to the ambitious adventures and grand finales of previous Formby vehicles. Whether staying at Ealing would’ve inspired a return to form is unclear but the Formby of Turned Out Nice Again certainly feels like an artist in need of a change.
20. The Show Goes On
Gracie Fields’ final film for Ealing before her move to 20th Century Fox puts a nice, neat bow on her time with the studio by presenting a semi-autobiographical tale of a working class mill worker’s rise to fame as an actress and singer. The Show Goes On is one of only three of Gracie’s Ealing films in which she played a character whose name wasn’t Gracie or Grace, in the same way George Formby nearly always played a George. Here she plays Sally, which creates an appropriate circularity in her Ealing story since that was also the name of the character she played in her first film, Sally in Our Alley, as well as the title of her most famous song (she would play a Sally once more two years later in 20th Century Fox’s Shipyard Sally). With its nods to the past, The Show Goes On feels tailor-made as a finale and, whether that was actually the case or not, it puts a satisfying full stop on the Gracie Fields Ealing story.
Sticking to tried and tested formulas was a common approach for star vehicles of the era, so The Show Goes On feels in some ways like a reprise of well-trodden ground for our Gracie, but formulas also become popular for a reason. This is the sort of predictable showbiz tale that goes down very easily on an evening where the viewer fancies something undemanding. That said, there are some differences from Gracies previous films. The character she plays here is noticeably more vulnerable, unlike the take-charge Gracie’s she’d been playing since Sing As We Go. There’s also a more dramatic bent to the story, which ends on an inevitable moment of sadness before the big flourish of a closing number. Throughout her time at Ealing, Gracie had made both Cinderella style rags to riches tales and down-to-earth tales of working class lives. The Show Goes On feels like the culmination of both types of film, with Gracie’s background given as much attention as her imminent celebrity. It’s a sweet, reverent send-off for one of Ealing’s biggest stars.
19. Sing As We Go
Sing As We Go is often considered to be the best Gracie Fields film, on the rare occasion that any of them get a mention these days. While there are others I prefer, it’s not hard to see why Sing As We Go is the one that has become the enduring cinematic image of our Gracie. After a couple of films in a row that had attempted to take the Lancashire lass and bung her into opulent surroundings, Sing As We Go returns to the working class roots of her debut, Sally in Our Alley. Beginning with the closure of the textile mill where Gracie works, the film then follows her to Blackpool in search of employment. The plot is episodic, teeming with minor characters and comic vignettes, but the real thrill of Sing As We Go is the opportunity to see a slice of 1930s Blackpool, the ultimate British working class holiday destination. Director Basil Dean shoots on location, which means we see the real resort in a delightful documentary-like fashion, as Gracie’s adventures take her from the Pleasure Beach to the circus to the tower. The story is negligible and the film does lose points for this as it starts to drag a little by the end of its slender 80 minutes, but for anyone who is more interested in the sight-seeing opportunities, the thin plot is a convenience.
Sing As We Go was written by no less a talent than J. B Priestley, the socially conscious writer best known for An Inspector Calls. Priestley’s left wing politics are evident in the film’s socialist attitudes and depiction of what can be achieved through good working relations between the bosses and their employees. To this end, we see the return of John Loder, Gracie’s co-star in the previous Love, Life and Laughter and notable as the only leading man thus far with whom Gracie had failed to walk off arm-in-arm. That happens again here, as Gracie steps aside to allow Loder’s character to pursue a more conventional leading lady type. In Love, Life and Laughter, Loder played a Prince, while here he is one of the mill bosses. In both cases, the decision to pull back from allowing a romance to develop between him and Gracie does seem telling in terms of how far these films were prepared to go in bridging the class divide. That said, Gracie bagged her upper class suitor in the earlier This Week of Grace, and it seems that there is another, more progressive motive at play in preventing the romance in these later films. Both Love, Life and Laughter and Sing As We Go end with Gracie surrounded by that for which she cares most. In the former it’s the children for whom she raises money, in the latter her co-workers at the mill, whom she leads triumphantly back to work while belting out the film’s joyous theme tune. The message seems not to be “stick to your own class” but rather “there are more important things in the world than wealth, status and romance.”
Sing As We Go is also notable for being the first Gracie Fields film in which she is not practically the whole show. In previous outings, the other characters and surroundings often felt like little more than distractions, whereas here Gracie is upstaged by the sights and sounds of Blackpool and ably supported by a very colourful cast who prove themselves able comic foils. There’s a wonderful montage towards the end of the film in which Gracie sings Love, Wonderful Love and we are shown snippets of all the other characters we have met throughout the film going about their lives. A policeman, played by upcoming star and Gracie’s lifelong friend Stanley Holloway, even gets to join in and perform his own verse and modest dance routine beneath Gracie’s window. Of course, Gracie is as vibrant as ever and the fact that we’re in her company often helps during the more testing lulls. Her final scene as she marches back to work is a suitably rousing finale, her beaming smile and earthy interaction with a crowd member who carelessly bustles past her ending the film on an uplifting and amusing note.
18. No Limit
In some ways there were similarities between Ealing’s first big star, Gracie Fields, and their second, George Formby. Both were working class Lancastrians who had come up through the music halls, both performed comic songs and both had unusual singing voices. But in other ways George and Gracie were very different, at least in how they were portrayed on screen. Gracie was indomitable, assertive and efficient, George was bumbling, shy and awkward. But both screen personas were brave, unpretentious and persistent, making them ideal icons for the Depression and then for wartime. In the aftermath of the war, when Ealing was making far more morally ambiguous Comedies for audiences disillusioned by deprivation, both stars found their popularity on the wane. But you only need to pop on one of their films to tap into that infectious optimism that drove their irresistible entertainments.
When Formby first came to Ealing, he had only made two films (not counting the lost 1915 silent film By the Shortest of Heads, which he made when he was only ten) and both of them had been low-budget, revue style quickies that don’t really stand up for most modern viewers. No Limit was the first time he was given a proper narrative. It was also the first time he played a character called George, a detail that remained consistent in all but one of his films after this. Similar to the way Gracie Fields usually played a character called Grace or Gracie, the use of Formby’s own first name meant audiences were instantly aware of who the character was going to be, while the changing surname allowed for each happy ending to remain intact when its respective film ended. The Formby films were usually a bit more ambitious, setting up a challenge for their hero and building to a big finish usually involving a sporting event or a run-in with villains. It’s a solid formula which worked again and again, and it was in place from the off with No Limit.
No Limit tells the story of George Shuttleworth, a motorbike enthusiast who dreams of winning the Isle of Man TT race. Written by Tom Geraghty and Fred Thompson from a story by Walter Greenwood (author of Love on the Dole, an influential novel about working class poverty) and directed by the future Mr. Gracie Fields, Monty Banks, No Limit suffers slightly from being the first of the Ealing Formbys. There are certain pacing issues that need ironing out and Formby shares top billing with his leading lady, Florence Desmond. Desmond was reportedly incensed when early promotional materials for No Limit spotlighted Formby and this proved to be just one of many bumps that made their offscreen relationship particularly rocky. Formby’s tyrannical wife Beryl would routinely upset everyone on set to the point where attempts were made to have her banned, and both Banks and Desmond would end their professional relationship with Formby after just two films.
Desmond did ultimately get her name above the title alongside Formby’s but the concessionary attempts to emphasise her as a co-lead ultimately scupper the film. As with Gracie Fields’ films, Formby was clearly the real star and once that was accepted he was able to thrive. But in No Limit, Formby has to share two of his four songs with Desmond, resulting in bland and sentimental duets like Your Way is My Way, where in later films there would be lively comic songs performed solo by Formby. By far the musical highlight here is Riding in the TT Races, sung by George alone with his ukulele, as it should be! The other song performed by just George is In a Little Wigan Garden, which I’ve never considered one of his better songs, and which is made more unpalatable by the fact he performs it in blackface, a rare and thankfully unrepeated occurrence for Formby (look up the stories of his 1946 tour of South Africa for a more representative view of his progressive attitudes to race). The performance of In a Little Wigan Garden is also marginalised by dialogue which is spoken over the top of the performance, an unthinkable intrusion in later Formby films where everything stops once the first uke string is plucked. Perhaps this is testament to the fact that Banks didn’t think much of the song either, although it is notable for featuring one of the filthiest of Formby’s legendary double entendres: “Here’s my girl and me, She’ll sit on me knee, And watch how the rhubarb grows!”
If the musical element of No Limit doesn’t quite land, the other major ingredient of the Formby films, the action set-piece, is spectacular. It’s a long time coming, with the plot often meandering in the build up to the climactic race, but when it arrives it is exciting and brilliantly shot, using the real 1935 Isle of Man TT as a backdrop. After a moment of ropey back projection in an early scene with George riding his motorbike, I was slightly concerned that I’d misremembered the quality of the racing scenes but I needn’t have worried. What we get instead is real driving in real locations with some terrific stunts, some of which Formby even performed himself. It’s a satisfying ending to an uneven but largely entertaining Ealing debut from Formby.
17. Feather Your Nest
There’s an erroneous claim that is often made that all of George Formby’s films were the same. This simply isn’t true. While George’s screen persona was pretty consistent, the film’s themselves found new angles all the time. Formby’s first three films for Ealing are clear evidence of this. Following the sports film No Limit and the frantic farce of Keep Your Seats Please, Feather Your Nest is a domestic comedy with a much more measured pace. It’s fair to say that Formby’s films usually involved him being reluctantly thrust into an adventure during which he’d win the love of an attractive middle class woman, but even that wasn’t always true. In the case of Feather Your Nest, for instance, George has already won the girl (in this case the likeable Polly Ward) when the film begins. The plot instead focuses on their attempts to secure enough money to set up home and get married. This gentle proto-sitcom approach was returned to four years later in Formby’s final Ealing film Turned Out Nice Again. While Formby’s adventure films are arguably more appealing, the cosy domesticity of these outliers also works quite nicely.
Feather Your Nest stars Formby as Willie Piper (the last time he would play a character called anything other than George), a clumsy worker at a gramophone record factory who accidentally breaks the only pressing of a popular singer’s new song Waiting by the Lamp on the Avenue. Fearing he will lose his job, Willie and his wife conspire to record a new version of the song. While it is immediately recognised as a fraud, Willie’s take on the song becomes a massive popular hit in its own right. Though this simple plot doesn’t have the thrills and spills of George’s entry in the TT Races in No Limit, it does manage to sustain its story well across the runtime in a manner that makes it overall superior to that film. It is also noticeable that Formby is now the only star credited above the title. After awkwardly sharing the spotlight with Florence Desmond in his first two films, Formby is finally able to assert his place as the main star, no longer having to share the quota of songs. Although Feather Your Nest does feature the lacklustre I’m As Happy As a Sandboy amongst its musical numbers, the film does a great job of weaving the music into the plot rather than just using it for a break in the action. To that end, we get a terrific performance of one of Formby’s signature songs, Leaning on a Lamppost. Written by Noel Gay, the song is second only to When I’m Cleaning Windows in terms of fame, and in terms of musicality it is actually far more interesting, with its sudden tempo change and apparent vocal improvisation. Though not a comic song like most of Formby’s output, Leaning on a Lamppost became an iconic theme tune for the Lancashire lad.
Given its simplicity, there are surprisingly few lulls in Feather Your Nest, although the action only ever reaches a certain modest pitch. The rarest of Formby’s films for many years due to copyright issues, Feather Your Nest finally got a proper release after 77 years of languishing in the wilderness. Though it could hardly be said that the film was worth quite that long a wait, it is another valuable piece in the Formby jigsaw and further testament to the fact that his films were far from all the same.
16. The Foreman Went to France
Although Tommy Trinder was brought to Ealing as a sort of replacement for George Formby, his career with the studio followed a very different trajectory. Although Tommy, like George, almost always played a character with his own name, Trinder appeared more often in Comedy-Dramas and as part of an ensemble. Although his high billing in every Ealing film in which he appeared betrays his pulling power for audiences, Trinder was frequently used as a charismatic character actor rather than a music hall entertainer providing a big screen approximation of his act. In fact, I was in two minds as to whether to include The Foreman Went to France on this list, since it is neither a star vehicle nor an outright Comedy. But as part of Trinder’s six film stint with Ealing and as an example of the range of roles he took on, I think the film is worth considering in this context, in much the same way that Gracie Fields’ Sally in Our Alley belongs here despite its more dramatic tendencies.
If The Foreman Went to France isn’t really a Comedy then Trinder’s function at the very least is to provide the film with a lighthearted and humorous layer. Based on the real-life wartime exploits of Welsh engineer Melbourne Johns, the story was brought to Ealing by J.B. Priestley and written by Leslie Arliss and Ealing Comedy stalwarts John Dighton and Angus MacPhail. The small group of main characters provide a nicely heroic band for which to root, although at times Clifford Evans’ protagonist seems a bit too underplayed, especially in the face of Trinder’s comparative overplaying. Still, when he turns up at about the 25 minute mark, Tommy gives the film a much needed shot in the arm and his continued presence after that keeps up the momentum, even if his likability does not always translate to hilarity and occasionally flirts with mild irritation. The main cast is completed by Constance Cummings and Gordon Jackson, with the latter particularly standing out. The supporting cast also features famous and reliable faces including Robert Morley and John Williams, both of whom are good in their limited screen time.
The Foreman Went to France isn’t quite a classic but it does have a pluckiness to it that makes it consistently enjoyable. Director Charles Frend, who would eventually direct a handful of the more underrated Ealing Comedies as well as some of its finest Dramas, demonstrates his abilities with both genres here, combining lighthearted asides with moments that genuinely get to grips with the horrors of war with a memorably vivid directorial style and some fine editing by future Kind Hearts and Coronets director Robert Hamer. While Ealing’s acquisition of Will Hay ultimately filled the star vehicle hole left by Formby, Tommy Trinder’s films feel all the more unique for their greater range and diversity. He works well slotted into this story as a supporting character, even if it was still him that audiences were likely coming to see.
15. Sally in Our Alley
Born above a Rochdale fish and chip shop, Gracie Fields never lost that Lancashire lass authenticity even when she became a major music hall star, a popular recording artist and eventually the highest paid film star in the world. By the time she made her first film, Sally in Our Alley, Fields was already a star of stage and record, so it was no surprise that the public flocked to see it, but the film’s reputation has dimmed somewhat over the years, to the point where it is frequently deemed mediocre at best and unwatchable at worst. I was completely new to Gracie Fields when I sat down to watch Sally in Our Alley. I was familiar with a few of her songs, although I think I’d only heard other artists sing them, but her persona was something I’d somehow avoided for four decades. Unlike George Formby or Will Hay, Gracie’s films were never on TV when l was younger and despite a continued public affection for her that had been obvious even anecdotally, the woman herself had somehow eluded me. The fact that from the very moment she appeared onscreen, everything about Gracie felt familiar, comfortable and delightful is testament to the power of her charismatic screen presence and abilities as a multi-faceted performer. There’s something about these unpretentious, defiantly unglamorous movie stars that immediately chimes with British audiences, ensuring that the viewers of the day immediately staked their claim to her with the enduring nickname “Our Gracie”, an instantaneous affection that is reflected in my own inability to refer to her by her surname alone.
Although Gracie’s appeal was by no means limited to British audiences, I suspect that those sharing her national identity will be the most likely to still find something to love in her debut picture. From its title to its sets, its characters and its music, Sally in Our Alley is a distinctively British slice of sentimental comic Melodrama that stirs something even inside of this unpatriotic millennial. An interest in and affection for the time period depicted and the filmmaking style of the era no doubt help in appreciating Sally in Our Alley as more than just a curio. I’ve read numerous reviews that seem to condemn the film based on little more than the poor sound quality of early talkies. While it’s true that I did have to crank the volume on my TV to over four times the level on which I usually have it, the sound seemed pretty decent for a film that emerged in the infancy of sound cinema. There is also a widely held contention that Gracie is the entire show here. Now, given that this is a star vehicle focused on Gracie, that didn’t seem like too much of a problem to me but it also didn’t seem quite true either. While Gracie is clearly the standout, she is ably supported by a good cast that includes Ian Hunter, a regular Hitchcock and Michael Powell collaborator who also appeared as King Richard in Michael Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Florence Desmond, a radio impressionist who would also go on to be George Formby’s leading lady in his first two films for Ealing.
While the romance between Gracie and Hunter is nominally the central plot, the story’s various deceptions and misunderstandings keep the couple apart for the majority of the runtime, and it is actually the unusual relationship between Gracie and Desmond that becomes the focus. Desmond’s character Florrie is the daughter of an abusive father to whom Gracie stands up, but Florrie shows herself to be a manipulative and dishonest character as well. In what felt like an unprecedentedly progressive sequence for its era, Gracie puts aside the damage Florrie has deliberately wrought on her relationship with Hunter and recognises that her behaviour stems from the abuse she has suffered, helping her to vent her pent up feelings by breaking all Gracie’s crockery. It’s a powerful, laudable scene, especially coming so soon after Gracie castigates two men for attempting to claim a right to discipline a woman through violence. Given that in the 30s domestic violence was still commonly used for laughs as often as it was for drama, this whole storyline felt immediately significant.
There is plenty of talent behind the camera too. The screenplay, based on Charles McEvoy’s stage play The Likes of Her, was written by two stalwarts of British cinema, character actor Miles Malleson (you may recognise him from literally everything!) and Alma Reville, usually spoken of as the wife of Alfred Hitchcock but more properly recognised as a talented screenwriter and editor in her own right. Director Maurice Elvey was a proficient journeyman with hundreds of credits to him name, and his efficiency is apparent here. There are also several songs sprinkled throughout, most notably Sally, written by William Haines, Harry Leon and Leo Towers. This gorgeous tune, which pops up numerous times throughout the narrative, became Gracie’s signature song and she performed it at every single concert she gave from this point on. A timeless melody to place alongside the likes of As Time Goes By, Sally works beautifully when matched with these scenes of working class Cockney existence, its saloon bar gutsiness making it the perfect emblematic theme for our Lancashire heroine.
While Sally in Our Alley could be seen as hackneyed, its smart combination of melodramatic tropes with splashes of social realism and a solid vein of humour throughout means it works as an engaging proto-Soap. It sags a little as it meanders towards its conclusion while trying to insert a few more awkward opportunities for Gracie to sing, but overall it’s a solid debut that launched a new star whose enormous potential was obvious from the get-go.
14. Keep Your Seats Please
George Formby’s first film for Ealing, No Limit, suffered from stretches of poor pacing and the fact that he had to share the spotlight with his co-star Florence Desmond, a decent and likeable actress whose unnecessarily accentuated presence nonetheless distracted from the obvious star of the show. By the time they made Keep Your Seats Please, Formby and Desmond were no longer on speaking terms and this split may have been the catalyst that allowed Formby to break free of a pairing that was holding back his potential. In Keep Your Seats Please, Desmond once again receives joint top-billing and while she is nicely used in terms of the plot, her involvement on the musical side spoils what were often highlights of Formby’s subsequent films, the songs. Formby performs his most famous song here, When I’m Cleaning Windows (although it’s a truncated version missing many of the best lines), as well as the lively title track, but elsewhere the song quota is eaten up by Desmond and cloying child star Binkie Stuart, a slightly creepy doll-like presence who was being set up as a British Shirley Temple. Desmond and Stuart perform a cutesy duet, You’ve Got Me Standing on the Tip of My Toes, and later Formby and Desmond perform a dreary lullaby to a tired Binkie, when really we want him to blast her out of bed with his ukulele!
If Keep Your Seats Please doesn’t quite allow Formby to break free from some of the restrictions that held back his Ealing debut, it at least solves the pacing issue of its predecessor. The film trades in No Limit’s ponderous storytelling for a set of frequently frantic comedic set-pieces as George, Florrie and their unscrupulous associate Max desperately search for a set of six chairs in which George’s late Aunt has hidden his inheritance. The basis for the improbable but fun premise comes from the satirical Russian novel The Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov, adapted several times including by Mel Brooks in 1970. The notion of George not only having to locate the missing chairs that have been mistakenly auctioned off but also slit them open in the homes of their new owners remains funny throughout, even if a couple of the skits are a bit over-the-top. One scene in which George tries to evade a nurse who is trying to undress him for medical reasons because he believes she’s trying to seduce him is particularly weak, although there is an unintentionally hilarious moment when George is very obviously switched out for a dummy. There’s also a scene at an auction in which George keeps bidding against himself which repeats the same punchline at least three times too many. Still, other moments build up a head of comic steam which proves infectious, such as a scene at a magic show involving animals emerging from surprising locations, or a sequence in which George and his associates are mistaken for the multiple lovers of a singing teacher.
Keep Your Seats Please is helped along by a strong supporting cast. Although the attempts to give her equal billing to Formby don’t pay off, Desmond is a charming foil and Binkie’s presence at least increases the stakes, with one comedy scene in which George and Florrie get locked in a room with a goat given added pathos by Florrie’s desperation to get back the child she loves. Several members of the cast would become recurring Formby co-stars, including Gus McNaughton, Enid Stamp-Taylor and Hal Gordon, and they provide a good deal of colour, although it is the appearances by two much bigger stars that really stand out. May Whitty, a staple of British cinema for several decades, gets a lovely one-scene cameo at the beginning in which she waxes lyrical about the glory of chairs, while Alastair Sim, his star very much on the ascendant, displays his ability to steal any scene in which he appears, as the opportunistic lawyer Drayton who is also on the trail of the missing chairs.
Keep Your Seats Please lacks the wow-factor of No Limit’s climactic racing sequence but it is overall a better and funnier film. The second and final Formby film directed by Monty Banks, who swore off working with Formby’s interfering wife Beryl ever again, Keep Your Seats Please was co-written by Anthony Kimmins, who would go on to direct the majority of Formby’s subsequent films for Ealing.
13. Come On George!
I first encountered George Formby films when I was a pre-teen and they were still regularly on TV. Come On George! is the film I recall being shown the most and therefore I have a fairly strong attachment to it. That’s why I went in to this rewatch expecting it to rank a little more highly on my list but, alas, in its chronological context and with the jaded eye of a 43 year old film buff who has seen many other films since my first viewing of Come On George!, this was a partial disappointment. I’m not saying this is a bad film by any means but if you were going to show a George Formby film to someone who had never seen one before, Come On George! is likely to be the one that would fulfil most of their negative preconceptions. Following the punchy and exciting duo of It’s in the Air and Trouble Brewing, Come On George! is a much gentler, slower-paced and tweely old-fashioned film.
Like Formby‘s Ealing debut No Limit, Come On George! improves significantly in its back end. The build up to the final stretch can sometimes be a bit wearing though. I think I used to respond more positively to the sweetly low-stakes meandering through bucolic scenes in country cottages and trips to fairgrounds but this time round all that felt much more like filler material. The main thrust of Come On George!, however, is good. George is an ice cream man at a racetrack who, when wrongly accused of being a pickpocket, flees the scene and ends up hiding out in the horse box of the notoriously deadly beast Maneater. Unaware of its reputation, George shows no fear and consequently strikes up a friendship with the horse in a way that others cannot. Maneater’s trainer seizes the opportunity to dupe George into racing Maneater, under the pretence that it is a meek and mild creature known as The Lamb. But when George finds out the truth, can he conquer his fears to win the Bargrave Stakes?
As long as it focuses on the horse racing plot, Come On George! is a lot of fun but it tries to cram too much into the story. The pickpocket storyline recurs throughout as George finds himself repeatedly coming face to face with his “victim”, while his lodging with the local police sergeant and his pretty daughter is an excuse to insert the obligatory romance. We also get stuck with a cutesy kid for the first time since Keep Your Seats Please, in this case a Dennis the Menace style tyke named Squib who is largely just an annoyance. Pat Kirkwood is given very little to work with as George’s love interest, partly because Formby’s furiously jealous wife Beryl tried to sabotage her performance, insisting she be dressed in unflattering clothes and that a proposed duet with Formby was changed to a solo performance instead. The final kiss was only achieved by Beryl being purposefully distracted by a phone call, and even then it’s a half-hearted affair planted somewhere between the lips and the ear. Given that there is a second underused female character in Meriel Forbes racing enthusiast, perhaps Come On George! would’ve done well to make her the love interest, thus keeping the main action at the stables and racetrack.
As usual, there are a couple of good songs here in I’m Making Headway Now and highlight I Couldn’t Let the Stable Down, although the vetoed duet Pardon Me feels a bit flaccid and might’ve worked much better had Kirkwood been allowed to retain her part in it, rather than just looking on and smiling. Still, this relationship pays off in the last act as the catalyst that sparks George’s heroism, and the mad dash to get to the racetrack, followed by the actual race itself as the finale, ends the film on fine form. Also of note is a scene in which a doctor hypnotises George to overcome his fears, only for the treatment to work too well. It gives Formby a rare chance to play a different kind of character from his usual shy Lancastrian persona. All in all, I still have a great deal of affection for Come On George! but its title can be applied in two ways: as an enthusiastic cry of support in the second half and as a wearied plea to a child dragging its heels in the first half.
12. Sailors Three
Having already lost their first big star Gracie Fields and knowing that their second, George Formby, was looking to leave the studio, Ealing needed to line up a new star turn. Their solution was to sign Tommy Trinder, a confident cockney lad who could hardly have been more different from Formby’s shy, stammering Lancastrian. While Fields and Formby were clearly the stars of their respective films from the beginning, Trinder was often part of an ensemble, though his bold, cocky performances made him instantly identifiable as the linchpin. This is true of Sailors Three, a wartime comedy in which Trinder is one of a trio of sailors who, after a night of drunken carousing, find themselves aboard the wrong ship and, in an attempt to get back to their own vessel, end up aboard the German pocket battleship that is the target of their mission. The other two sailors are played by Michael Wilding, a handsome but forgettable leading man type, and Claude Hulbert, an amusing light comedian who looks like the love child of Alec Guinness and Ronald Shiner. While Hulbert’s gentle humour dominates during the early stages, it is Trinder who seizes the reins as the film progresses and the stakes mount up. Although the impression is that Trinder’s charisma would’ve made this happen naturally anyway, the script clearly indicates that it happened by design as several of the later scenes make prominent use of Trinder’s own stage catchphrase “You lucky people!” While this reference may be lost on many modern viewers, it was clearly a surefire laugh in its time since the film chooses to end on that very line.
Sailors Three was written by a reliable trio of Ealing writers in Austin Melford, John Dighton and Angus MacPhail, and there are plenty of nice gags, lines and ideas. The German battleship being full of bananas is an especially good one, particularly since the film somehow resists the obvious lure of the banana skin as a comic prop. Although the focus is on action and comedy, Sailors Three chucks in a couple of songs too, including the opening All Over the Place, an extremely popular wartime tune given a rousing performance here. Sung by the entire fleet, the number spotlights Trinder as a self-appointed conductor, again drawing the audience’s focus onto the real star of the show. Still, the first half hour of Sailors Three is taken up by the old-fashioned stereotype of the skirt-chasing sailor, during which neither Trinder nor Wilding are portrayed as very likeable. However, this allows the largely marginalised leading lady Carla Lehmann a nice scene in which she humiliates them both, and the subsequent adventure is designed to redeem the characters whom the first reel has portrayed as mere womanisers, boozers and saps. The set-up for Sailors Three is very strong and once the trio of leads are aboard the battleship, it becomes both funny and exciting. Director Walter Forde draws on his music hall experience to juggle his diverse characters well, although occasionally a decent gag is oversold by an unnecessary slapstick sound effect being thrown in.
Trinder’s debut for Ealing was strong enough that he would go on to make five more films for the studio, but unlike Fields and Formby these would not follow a particular formula. Trinder was a different kind of performer from his predecessors and would appear in several more dramatic films. Even the Sailors Three sequel Fiddlers Three was a very different kind of film, incorporating time travel into its story. Crucially though, Trinder was the only star of Sailors Three to return for its sequel, suggesting that audiences were interested in seeing him even if they weren’t sure exactly what they might get each time.
11. Trouble Brewing
After a strong showing with both Keep Fit and It’s in the Air, Anthony Kimmins continued to write and direct very fine George Formby vehicles with the Comedy Crime Thriller Trouble Brewing. It’s often noted that Trouble Brewing is different from other Formby films in that it makes George part of a double act with Gus McNaughton, but this was actually a replay of a dynamic established in the earlier Keep Your Seats Please, right down to the casting. McNaughton had appeared in a couple of previous Formby films as shady, manipulative characters, and for Trouble Brewing he draws from this same well but is more of a roguish pal, on the same side as George but happy to let him do all the dirty work. The pair work well together, their contrasting energies giving the film a hint of the madcap style that defined Keep Your Seats Please. But Trouble Brewing is a little more controlled in its delivery, tying together most of its skits with a plot in which budding detective George tries to track down a gang of counterfeiters. Some of the sequences are a little too silly, such as a tacked-on wrestling match which feels like a less funny replay of the Apache Dance sequence from Gracie Fields’ Queen of Hearts, but once the Crime plot is properly underway the film builds up a head of steam, with a fantastic face-off at a brewery providing an exciting finale.
Kimmins had help on the screenplay from Michael Hogan and Angus McPhail. Hogan would work on the adaptation of Hitchcock’s Rebecca the following year, while Mcphail wrote some of most famous Ealing films of the following decade including Whiskey Galore! and It Always Rains on Sunday, as well as working with Hitchcock on Spellbound and The Wrong Man. This strong writing team clearly knew the sort of broad comedy they were writing in Trouble Brewing and were able to deliver on that level, but they also included a few clever plot wrinkles that are testament to their greater ambition. There’s one particularly smart ironic twist involving a typewriter that stands out as a great piece of plotting.
Also bringing extra class to the production are Garry Marsh, finally promoted to main villain after a couple of impressive supporting roles in previous Formby films, and rising star Googie Withers as George’s love interest. Withers has always been one of my favourite British actresses and she is excellent here. Though McNaughton’s extended role means she is slightly more marginalised than previous Formby girls, she comes into her own in the final reel as a not-so-passive damsel-in-distress. Withers is also notable for being the only co-star who kissed George on the lips. Formby had always been denied celebratory lip-locks by his wife Beryl (a tyrannical presence by all accounts, although Formby’s affair with previous co-star Kay Walsh obviously didn’t help on that front) but apparently during a rare moment when Beryl was absent from set, Withers was instructed to make the kiss “a whopper”, something that Formby clearly enters into with equal gusto. It’s nice to see a proper climactic kiss after some of the awkward sidemouth cheekrubs that close other Formby films, but one can only imagine the nervous state George must’ve been in at the premiere!
If it doesn’t quite soar to the heights of Formby’s very best work, Trouble Brewing is the sort of reliably entertaining film guaranteed to keep its star at the top of the box office, and there are a few narrative and comedic peaks that help it stand out from his more middling efforts. Fast-paced, fun and capped off by three great musical numbers (including the famous Fanlight Fanny and the irresistible Hitting the Highspots Now), Trouble Brewing kept the Formby juggernaut barrelling on at full speed.
10. My Learned Friend
Will Hay’s final film for Ealing, and as it turned out the final film of his career, could have signalled a new and interesting direction for him. As well as dwelling even more strongly on a dark, murderous storyline than his first Ealing film The Ghost of St. Michael’s, My Learned Friend also features Hay in a different kind of role. Rather than the incompetent authority figures with which he had made his name, Hay portrays a shrewd, unscrupulous shyster who was disbarred from his former job as a barrister. Hay’s first scene finds him easily destroying twenty three separate misdemeanour charges against him using his trademark brand of double talk. While Hay was generally the one who ended up being humiliated by these verbally dexterous scenes, here he is fully in control. This is a continuation and expansion of a change that began with his previous film The Goose Steps Out but Hay’s character here is even more self-assured. He still incorporates the famous double takes and dry little quips that audiences had come to love but there’s a pleasing broadening of the performance style that I would have loved to see develop further. Sadly, it was during pre-production of My Learned Friend that Hay got the cancer diagnosis that finally killed him six years later.
Another element of Hay’s career at Ealing that I’d have liked to see develop further was his burgeoning double act with Claude Hulbert. Although many Hay fans bemoan the loss of his former co-stars Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt, the Hay/Hulbert dynamic seen in The Ghost of St. Michael’s and My Learned Friend is every bit as great. Hulbert carved out a niche for himself as a likeable toff in films such as His Lordship Regrets and Sailors Three. Though rarely the star of his films, he was always a more than reliable supporting player who would often steal scenes. That power is on display here in a great sequence in a bar and gambling den in which he finds himself dancing with an insistent gangster’s moll. Hulbert’s slower delivery and skill with a pratfall is a fine match for Hay’s rapid fire verbal poppycock and deft, deceptively subdued physicality.
A third fine performance comes in the shape of Mervyn Johns unhinged serial killer, who is stalking and bumping off those he deems responsible for his recent incarceration. This plot means that the body count in My Learned Friend grows surprisingly high as Johns inevitably works his way towards Hay, the barrister who lost his case. My Learned Friend is often cited as a forerunner for Ealing’s Kind Hearts and Coronets and it is no coincidence that one of its writers is John Dighton, who co-wrote that later classic as well. While there are shared themes, My Learned Friend’s overall approach is a far cry from Kind Hearts’ urbane style. This being a Will Hay film, the emphasis is on gags, smartly written exchanges, exaggerated reactions and occasional interludes of slapstick. Inevitably not everything works, with a daft sequence in a mental health institute falling particularly flat, although its un-PC approach is consistent with the era’s cartoonish attitude to mental health that was so exaggerated and non-specific that it hasn’t retrospectively emerged as devastatingly offensive. Generally though, the hit rate in My Learned Friend is as high as that of its crazed killer, with the final sequence on the clock-face of Big Ben working nicely in a way that was not always a guarantee with the slapstick finales in Hay films. The ambiguous ending also feels like a lovely note on which to leave the career of one of Britain’s comedy greats.
9. Queen of Hearts
By the time Gracie Fields made her penultimate film for Ealing, she’d played a lot of different roles, even if her personality from film to film remained basically unaltered. She’d been the dramatic lead in a Comedy-Drama, she’d been the romantic lead in Cinderella-style tales of love transcending class-divisions, and most recently she’d been the working class martyr who loses the man for the sake of championing the cause. Though she fit nicely into all these roles, there was also a maudlin tinge that crept into all of them, which the joyous Queen of Hearts thankfully sheds entirely. This tale of a working class seamstress who is mistaken for a rich patron of the arts is 100% comic, directed with breathless pacing by the future Mr. Gracie Fields, Monty Banks.
Banks brings a reinvigorated joie de vivre to Queen of Hearts, allowing Gracie to indulge in some of her finest clowning yet, unhampered by the demands of moist-eyed melodramatic interruptions. Paired with John Loder for the third and final time, she finally gets her man as the pair share both a kiss and a jovial closing number. The fun musical numbers are present and correct, of course, but this time round the comedy very much takes precedence. From a lively opening sequence in which she helps escort Loder’s drunken theatre star home to the extended mistaken identity plot that makes up the bulk of the film, the laughs are bigger and bolder than in the films that immediately preceded Queen of Hearts. One lengthy set-piece in particular is strikingly hilarious, in which a reluctant Gracie is tasked with participating in an Apache dance in with her partner violently tosses her around like a rag doll.
While there was much to admire in Gracie’s more political films, the humour sometimes took a back seat. Liberated from that, Queen of Hearts reinstates a deft wit and physicality that often went underused in its immediate predecessors. Banks’ direction and the lively screenplay help Gracie reach her full potential, with her charismatic presence fully restored after having become somewhat mannered of late. Oddly, this little gem appears to be one of Gracie’s least discussed films, perhaps because its more frivolous charms have less historical resonance when discussing Depression era cinema. But from the point of view of pure entertainment, Queen of Hearts is one of our Gracie’s finest pictures.
8. Keep Fit
With Keep Fit, the fourth of George Formby’s films for Ealing, the series really began to hit its stride. Initial entries had all been enjoyable but were patchy in terms of quality and pacing. Keep Fit returns to the sporting theme of the first Ealing Formby, No Limit, but rather than leaning heavily on its finale, Keep Fit delivers plenty of fun set-pieces in the run up to the climactic boxing match, allowing characters and relationships to develop along the way so as to create suitably high stakes. This was the first Formby film to be directed by Anthony Kimmins, with director and star building up a nice working relationship across four subsequent films, several of which are among the best Formby ever made. Kimmins, along with Austin Melford, also wrote the screenplay and it is a fine mix of Lancashire wit, underdog vs. bully brio, goofy slapstick, innocent romance and sporting thriller.
Keep Fit finds George, a lovelorn barber, competing with bullying boss Guy Middleton for the affections of manicurist Kay Walsh. Unlike in previous films, where the female lead usually fell for Formby very quickly, Keep Fit sets up plenty of obstacles in his path to romantic fulfilment. Formby and Walsh have good chemistry, perhaps due to the fact that they had a brief affair during production, something that probably cost Walsh a recurring role in future Formby films (she appeared in one more before Formby’s wife Beryl vetoed her return). Still, Walsh went on to build her own impressive career as an icon of British film, with roles that gave her much more to work with than this simple romantic interest part. Still, Walsh is one of the spunkiest of the Formby heroines, making the most of her underwritten character.
Although he is ably supported by a cast that includes the likeable George Benson as best pal Ernie, Guy Middleton as an instantly loathsome rival and Gus McNaughton as an unscrupulous publicity man, Keep Fit makes no bones about who its real star is. By this stage, attempts to give Formby’s leading ladies joint top billing had been abandoned completely in the face of the Lancashire lad’s rising popularity. George gets three songs here, all of which are good. Biceps, Muscle and Brawn and the title track stand out, but the romantic ballad I Don’t Like ditches the dreary sentimentalism of romantic numbers from earlier Formby films and instead introduces raunchy gags, achieving a consistent tone across the film’s three songs that was missing in the haphazard song choices of Formby’s previous pictures. There are no duets or songs given to other cast members. This is Radio George, all Formby, all the time!
Like No Limit before it and Come On George! later down the line, Keep Fit builds to a big sporting event as its finale. The boxing match is well directed, despite a couple of very long shots that clearly use body doubles, and mixes cartoonish slapstick with genuine suspense, despite the fact that the outcome is inevitable. It’s a strong end to a film that delivers solid entertainment throughout and is the first of the Formby films that works in nearly every way, from its silliest pratfall to its drollest aside.
7. The Goose Steps Out
After the disappointing The Black Sheep of Whitehall, Will Hay was back to his best with the excellent The Goose Steps Out. While all Hay’s films for Ealing thus far had been somehow related to the war, The Goose Steps Out features the most prominent and satisfying Nazi-bashing since George Formby belted Hitler round the chops two years earlier. In a variation on his most famous persona, that of a schoolmaster, Hay’s teacher William Potts loses his job after being arrested for being a German spy. When it transpires that Potts is actually the double of the real spy, he is offered a position with British intelligence and redeployed to Germany where he will teach the Hitler Youth about British customs and behaviour, while attempting to gather information about a new secret weapon being developed by the Nazis.
While this setup allows for plenty of action and wartime hijinks, it also plays to Hay’s greatest strengths by placing him back in a situation where verbal comedy is ripe for the picking. An early scene in which Hay teaches the young Germans about British language must rank among his finest scenes ever. It is filled with clever wordplay using the bizarre vagaries of the English language but with the interesting twist of Hay’s character being more in control than his pupils. While he does inevitably become befuddled, the fact that he is teaching Nazis allows us to root for him to embarrass them, rather than just sit back and lap up the chaos as we had in Hay’s other school-based scenarios. This particular scene ends with an iconic moment of British comedy, in which Hay teaches the boys that flicking the V’s is a British mark of respect and then gets them all to repeatedly salute a portrait of Hitler using only two fingers.
An interesting feature of The Goose Steps Out is how Hay is less incompetent than in other films. He is still a bumbler to some extent, even blurting out that he is a British spy while drunk, but he is also much braver than past characters he’s played and comes out on top in several scenes that would have previously ended in his humiliation. Strong support comes once again from Charles Hawtrey as the most precocious pupil, as well as a very young Peter Ustinov who is hilarious as a fiercely fascistic young German. The only thing that really lets The Goose Steps Out down a little is a chaotic slapstick finale on an out-of-control plane, but even this had its moments, especially the endearingly primitive effects, and given the sheer amount of great scenes that lead up to it, not quite sticking the landing (in this case literally) is not enough to kill this golden goose.
6. The Ghost of St. Michael’s
Unlike Ealing’s other stars, Gracie Fields, George Formby and Tommy Trinder, Will Hay was already an established and popular screen presence when he arrived at Ealing. That explains why his first film for the studio already exudes a level of confidence and expertise to which the aforementioned entertainers had to build. Hay had made thirteen feature films for other studios prior to The Ghost of St. Michael’s and for his Ealing debut he returned to his most tried and tested persona, that of a befuddled schoolmaster, with which he had made his name on the stage and in films like Boys Will Be Boys and Good Morning, Boys. In contrast with the physical comedy and rousing morale boosting of his contemporaries, Hay’s style was primarily verbal and subversive, with smart exchanges, absurdist diversions and satirical takedowns of authority figures aplenty. Hay’s performances felt less eager to please, drawing their appeal from understated quips, deftly realised stumbling deliveries and perfectly timed double takes. Hay’s characters were generally incompetent despite an air of unearned self-assurance, quite different from his predecessors with their wells of untapped heroism. Hay didn’t have to emerge as the hero of his stories, instead winning audiences over with relatable and entertaining portraits of flawed humanity.
Hay, known to be a rather serious and eccentric man offscreen, made the move to Ealing partly as a way to bring to an end the successful screen partnership he had forged with co-stars Graham Moffatt and Moore Marriott. Although the fact that Marriott had begun to receive bigger reactions from audiences than Hay himself was an acknowledged factor, Hay’s decision seems to have been driven more by a fear of repetition creeping into his act. After all, in The Ghost of St. Michael’s he happily shares the screen with a couple of scene-stealing co-stars, Claude Hulbert and a young (though not as young as the schoolboy he’s portraying) Charles Hawtrey. Both prove effective foils for Hay, whose inadequately equipped schoolmaster routine is as superb as it ever was. The classic music hall comedic rhythms are on full display in an excellent scene in which Hay tries to teach a roomful of smart alec scholars about the theory of gravity, a subject on which he himself seems unclear. Through wonderfully fumbly back-and-forths, the scene builds to a climax in which Hay ends up perched atop a precarious stack of chairs.
Despite its title, The Ghost of St. Michael’s is more of a black Comedy Thriller than a ghost story. The plot, which sees an evacuated school and its staff transferred to a remote Scottish castle, sets up the possibility of supernatural mayhem but the horrors are more down-to-Earth when a murder occurs and Hay finds himself chief suspect. The plot builds nicely and, despite keeping the laughs coming, serves up a generous helping of suspense too. Written by John Dighton and Angus MacPhail, a pair responsible for many great Ealing screenplays, The Ghost of St. Michael’s is cleverly structured and that solid narrative backbone supports the foregrounded comedy and prevents the film from ever sagging. It builds to a fun, high stakes climax involving secret passages and booby-trapped rooms, which allows for some level of physical comedy without sacrificing Hay’s real strengths as a performer. As a debut film for a new studio, The Ghost of St. Michael’s could hardly have been more reassuring for fans with misgivings about Hay trying something new.
5. The Bells Go Down
Tommy Trinder’s third film for Ealing was, like his second The Foreman Went to France, a Comedy Drama featuring an ensemble cast. But unlike that film, in which Trinder had been the supporting comedy relief, The Bells Go Down prominently foregrounds Trinder’s Tommy Turk as its protagonist. The film begins as a lighthearted wartime tale of a couple of down-on-their-luck men who meet in a London pub and decide to join the Auxiliary Fire Service. Discovering a stricter and less congenial regime than they expected, the newly appointed recruits soon discover that being a firefighter during wartime is no joke.
The tone of the film darkens as bombings begin to take place and the threat to everyone’s lives becomes horribly apparent, but Trinder’s boisterous demeanour provides the film with a continued sense of humour. Trinder generally played a variation on his stage persona but with slight tweaks each time. Tommy Turk is a different man from Tommy Hoskins in The Foreman Went to France or Tommy Taylor in Sailors Three. Keeping the same instantly recognisable first name but changing the surname was something Ealing had also done with George Formby and Gracie Fields, but Trinder’s roles are easier to differentiate from one other because they are coloured by the action around them rather than driving it. It’s no surprise to find that Tommy Turk is a gambler, a boozer, a womaniser and a joker, but the structure of his narrative is not clearly mapped out from the beginning and he does go through emotional changes, unlike Formby whose films expected other characters to go through those changes in order to realise how great their underestimated protagonist was.
Like Formby and Gracie Fields before him, Trinder isn’t so much a great actor as a great performer. He brings his distinctive energy to each film and consequently brings in the audiences who enjoyed it last time. But Fields and Formby occasionally pulled out a more impressive performance when the material allowed and so Trinder also rises to the occasion when given a strong screenplay. Roger MacDougall wrote a plum role for Trinder in The Bells Go Down and he gives it his all, convincing as a real person in a way that is crucial for this more realistic story to work. He is ably supported by an on-the-rise James Mason, second-billed to Trinder but already showing the subtlety and humanism that would make him a full-blown international star in the coming years. His apparently stuffy commanding officer is allowed to reveal his layers slowly and in an unsentimentally low-key manner.
The fire-fighting scenes in The Bells Go Down are immersive and exciting, with a real sense of the action achieved through sets, models and footage taken at actual fires caused by air raids from the previous two years. Although there are moments in the action that border on silly, such as when the lovestruck newlywed Bob uses a phone in a window engulfed by flames to call his wife, the balance of melodrama and reverent realism is largely achieved quite well. The Bells Go Down tends to live in the shadow of Humphrey Jennings’ Fires Were Started, a fictionalised Documentary placing real firemen in a scripted scenario, but the two films compliment each other quite nicely, with Ealing’s film emphasising the relationships between its characters and the solidarity of group camaraderie more prominently than Jennings’ sober picture. Despite its moments of tragedy, The Bells Go Down achieves a pleasingly celebratory air, something that doubtless chimed with audiences at the tail end of the war.
4. Looking on the Bright Side
After the mega-success of her debut film Sally in Our Alley, it was inevitable that Gracie Fields would make a follow-up. Having confirmed her potential as a star, Ealing (then known as Associated Talking Pictures) stepped up their game considerably in terms of production values. If Sally in Our Alley was a comedic Melodrama peppered with song snippets, Looking on the Bright Side immediately stakes its claim to being a full scale Musical, with an impressive opening production number that takes up the majority of the first ten minutes. Tracing the rising success of a new musical number written by Richard Dolman’s aspiring songwriter Laurie, the sequence introduces the titular theme song against a backdrop of communal joy as Gracie and Laurie dish out the sheet music to all the neighbours in their tenement block. Clifford Pember’s art design is fantastic, with the tenement becoming a bustling hub of activity as Gracie and Laurie dance up the stairs and their neighbours cavort in the background. The song itself is great and becomes a recurring motif throughout the film, as the song Sally had done in its predecessor. The scene is reminiscent of the opening to Rouben Mamoulian’s classic Love Me Tonight, released the same year, in which the song Isn’t It Romantic is passed from person to person. Though not quite the equal of that legendary sequence, it is testament to the increased quality of Gracie’s second picture that the comparison even comes to mind.
Another thing that makes Looking on the Bright Side such an improvement over Sally in Our Alley is its more coherent sense of identity. While Sally in Our Alley had been a Melodrama but with bits of Comedy and Musical that didn’t always fit together comfortably, Looking on the Bright Side is undoubtedly a Comedy Musical first and foremost. The dramatic plot, in which Laurie leaves Gracie behind as his fame allows him to pursue a young actress, is there to provide structure but, as had been the case with Sally in Our Alley, Gracie’s leading man is quickly sidelined so the film can quite rightly focus on her. Finding herself excised from the showbiz world, Gracie joins the police force. This plot strand initially concerned me as it seemed like such a sharp, abrupt narrative swerve that I thought the film might be losing its way. In fact, the Gracie the Police Officer segment is one of the strongest and really showcases her talents as a comedian. It’s full of great gags and character beats as Gracie jovially skips through the streets and faces off against an officious Sergeant. Although it could be seen as a narrative cul-de-sac, this lengthy sequence provides a juxtaposition between the dreams of stardom that opened the film and the realities of everyday work. Gracie’s continued optimism despite her heartbreak resonates with the film’s title and theme tune.
Although Richard Dolman is nominally the film’s second lead, his merely adequate acting and his character’s speedy marginalisation allow the secondary spotlight to be stolen by Julian Rose, a music hall contemporary of Gracie’s whose comic monologues were based around his Jewish identity (he was frequently billed as “Our Hebrew Friend”). Rose’s delivery and timing are straight out of vaudeville and his character, a cynical producer, allows him plenty of opportunity to deliver one-liners and putdowns galore. This was Rose’s first film appearance and later that same year he was given the leading role in his own film, Money Talks. Sadly, his ascendant star was scuppered by his death just three years later.
The music in Looking on the Bright Side, despite not including a song as iconic as Sally, is a step up from Gracie’s previous film. Howard Flynn’s title track, Leo Towers and Harry Leon’s ballad After Tonight We Say Goodbye and Michael Carr, William Haines and Jimmy Harper’s comic song He’s Dead but He Won’t Lie Down are all a treat, while Harry Parr Davies is tasked with the unenviable job of writing a dreary and unmemorable song to symbolise Laurie’s lost muse. He delivers a perfectly judged composition in this respect, in the shape of I Hate You, which is perfectly awful from the title onwards. Unlike in Gracie’s debut film where the music often felt tacked on, here it is baked into the plot. There is also a particularly well realised symbol in the shape of two clown puppets that dangle on a string between Gracie and Laurie’s flats. They use them to communicate, tapping on each other’s windows before sliding back to the middle of the string to be reunited. The screenplay cleverly contrives to have the two lovers eventually become the clown puppets by way of a costume party finale and the visual metaphor pulls everything together, quite literally in the final image in which the tenements are drawn towards each other so Gracie and Laurie can be united. It’s a triumphant closing image for a bold, brilliant film.
3. It’s in the Air
In 1938, Britain was on the cusp of war and preparations were being made. George Formby’s second film of 1938 reflected the times, focusing on his foiled attempts to become an air raid warden and his accidental induction into the RAF when a series of misunderstandings lead to him being taken for his brother-in-law, a mistake which could lead to his arrest. So we follow George’s adventures on an RAF base where his bumbling nature attracts the attention of a bullying corporal and an easily exasperated sergeant major, as well as the affections of the base’s cook who also happens to be the sergeant major’s daughter. It’s in the Air gets into its plot quickly and offers a cleverly structured set of skits which work as standalone comedy bits but also incorporate key pieces of information which pull the plot together. More so than any of Formby’s previous films, It’s in the Air boasts a confidence in its material that allows it to toss in a few experiments, including an extended silent sequence in which George and the sergeant major find themselves inadvertently sharing a room but are unaware of each other’s presence. It’s a deftly conceived and executed piece of comedy.
It’s in the Air features a strong supporting cast, with familiar faces drafted in from previous Formby films including Jack Hobbs from No Limit, Polly Ward from Feather Your Nest, Esma Cannon from I See Ice and Formby mainstay Hal Gordon, who would also appear in Formby’s next four films. Standouts are Garry Marsh, last seen in I See Ice and soon to step up to the role of main villain in two of Formby’s best films, who here plays the stern but fair-minded base commander, and one-timer Julien Mitchell who hams it up furiously but entirely appropriately as the blustering sergeant major. The hot-headed sergeant vs. new recruit dynamic is a classic comedy staple and you can either play it with the new recruit being a wise-ass or a nincompoop. It’s in the Air has it both ways, with Formby’s misdemeanours being the result of sabotage by the jealous Corporal Craig. This allows for George to be a convincing hero only put in the unfortunate position of having to offer stammering explanations by the manipulation of a villain. When given the chance, he can prove himself as heroic as the airmen he idolises, and he is not above a bit of contempt for authority either, as the classic song Our Sergeant Major attests. The scene in which he is caught singing the insulting song by the sergeant major himself, hauled before his superiors and quickly rewrites a new complimentary set of lyrics is a classic routine.
While earlier Formby films often tried to impose big, anthemic numbers on their star, by this point it had largely been realised that the simplicity of George and his ukulele were all that was needed. It’s in the Air, however, introduces a preposterously rousing title theme which gets its own modest production number in which an entire canteen of airmen join George in singing it. Written by Harry Parr Davies, who wrote many of Gracie Fields’ most rousing anthems, It’s in the Air the song is an absolute delight. This is a film bursting with music, featuring two great Formby solo tracks, each of which is cleverly incorporated into the plot, and then the glorious titular centrepiece which is as uplifting a musical moment as any of its contemporaries. All three songs also get a reprise, elevating It’s in the Air from the usual Comedy with a few songs approach of Formby’s other films, to something closer to an actual Musical.
With his regular tours to support the troops, Formby would soon become an entertainer inextricably linked with the war. This association would ultimately cost him dearly in the post-war era when tastes changed and audiences no longer wanted such effusive optimism, but for this period Formby was the most popular entertainer in the country. Although It’s in the Air doesn’t explicitly mention the war, the imminent threat is written all over it and George’s enthusiasm to join up and do his bit must’ve made him an easy hero for whom to root. Just a few films down the line, the allusions to war became less veiled and Formby would be punching out Hitler to the delight of cheering cinema audiences. It’s in the Air gets the wartime Formby era off to a rousing and delightful start. Brilliantly scripted and directed by Anthony Kimmins, it is by far the best of Formby’s films up to this time and one of Ealing’s finest Comedies of the 30s.
2. Let George Do It!
Let George Do It! was the first George Formby film to prominently feature the Second World War as a plot point. Consequently, the stakes feel a lot higher as George holds not only the fate of the British Navy in the palm of his hand but also the morale of a nation who adored him. Formby’s films usually saw his unlikely hero step up to achieve some major feat, be it winning a horse race or foiling a counterfeiting gang. It was not a great leap to transfer this formula onto a wartime template, with George taking on German spies who have infiltrated a Norwegian hotel in the guise of a dance band. While some found it distasteful to suggest that a gormless character like George could take on the Nazis, it’s important to remember that audiences did not see Formby as the simpleton as which he is sometimes erroneously characterised. Rather, Formby represented the British everyman, the working class hero whose cheery, awkward persona masked the heart of a lion. Far from diminishing the threat of the Nazis, Formby’s films buoyed up the courage of their fans.
Despite him becoming a figure synonymous with wartime entertainment, only a small handful of Formby’s films address the war directly. Let George Do It! is not only the best of these but the best of Formby’s films overall, standing out as just about the best example imaginable of a film of its type. This was the first Formby film directed by Marcel Varnel who, aside from Spare a Copper, would direct every other Formby film until the end of the star’s screen career. Varnel had already earned his comedy credentials with a series of popular Will Hay films and his direction here is superb, elevating Formby from his usual modest image to something bordering on iconic. His introduction, in which a party of entertainers in a dimly lit train station are illuminated by a torch, makes the most of the audiences anticipation of seeing their hero by wrong-footing them when he is briefly absent from the lineup. While always an entertaining presence in his previous outings, Formby is excellent in Let George Do It!, perhaps emboldened by the strength of the material. The screenplay was written by a stellar team including future director Basil Dearden, Whiskey Galore! scribe Angus MacPhail, and John Dighton, who would later work on the screenplays for Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit and Roman Holiday.
Let George Do It! never lets up in the entertainment stakes. Kicking off with a murder, establishing this as a darker world than that seen in Come On George! or Keep Fit, the film uses comic misunderstandings to land George in the path of danger. Crucially, he is given the chance to bail when he finds out the truth but instead chooses to pursue the villains, even if his decision is swayed by the presence of Phyllis Calvert’s attractive British agent. Calvert is one of the most assertive of the Formby heroines, her active role in the narrative affording her better material than some of her predecessors. George too is portrayed in a more assertive light, with the film’s title proving less ironic than audiences may have at first expected. This is a version of George who gets things done no matter the danger, which eventually lands him on a German U-boat for a tense finale. The team of talented writers have provided some very inventive sequences, including a silent routine in which George snoops around the hotel room of the ringleader while he is in the bath, a sort of higher stakes take on a similar sequence from the previous It’s in the Air. There’s a scene in which George monologues to himself as he gets ready for bed (including the shortest brushing of teeth ever put on film!) which demonstrates how the screenplay provides new acting challenges for Formby and how well he rises to them. Most famously, there is an extended dream sequence in which a drugged George imagines himself dropping in on a German rally and punching Hitler out cold. One can only imagine the cheers this scene must have elicited from contemporary audiences and it certainly got the film noticed, obtaining it a US release under the title To Hell with Hitler (a surprising choice given the word “Hell” is one that is regularly self-consciously censored in Formby’s lyrics).
Let George Do It! also benefits from a cracking quota of songs, increased to four from the usual three. Music plays a big part in this story so we get extra tune Count Your Blessings and Smile, one of the most rousing showstoppers of Formby’s career. This irresistible big band arrangement is contrasted with Formby’s trademark ukulele pieces, with a performance of Grandad’s Flannelette Nightshirt in a train station approximating the atmosphere of Formby’s famous tours to entertain the troops. Mr. Wu’s a Window Cleaner now smashes together two of Formby’s most famous songs, with the Chinese laundryman character from Chinese Laundry Blues adopting the profession of the protagonist of When I’m Cleaning Windows. Finally, Oh, Don’t the Wind Blow Cold is performed during an escape attempt, with verses punctuated by foiled dashes for exits and a daring swing from a chandelier. All four songs are strong and lively, in keeping with the driving pace of this particular outing.
Although Formby’s films are sadly rarely discussed these days, on the occasion that they are mentioned it is usually agreed that Let George Do It! stands as his finest work. This was the peak of George’s screen career and while there were plenty more films to come, the initial boost he received from the wartime spirit would soon flag disastrously as the nation’s mood changed in the post-war malaise. But when it comes to British Comedy stars of the era, few have a film as lastingly wonderful as Let George Do It! to their name.
1. Champagne Charlie
An absolutely fantastic, brilliantly immersive evocation of the music halls of the 1860s, Champagne Charlie is one of Ealing’s finest films. It features the best performance Tommy Trinder ever gave, allowing him to try something different from the variations on his stage persona on which he had thus far been falling back, but in a way that fully capitalises on his natural showmanship. Trinder plays George Leybourne, a music hall singer whose rapid rise to fame singing booze-themed songs upsets The Great Vance, a similar performer who has also made his name with odes to drink. The story of their feud is simple, allowing for a steady flow of lively performances of specially written songs. Although a few real tunes from the era are included, the songs in Champagne Charlie are mostly dead-on pastiches written by, among others, Lord Berners, Billy Mayerl, Diana Morgan and one of Ealing’s finest scribes, T.E.B. Clarke. The writers have nailed the sound and style of music hall and the cast have the performance techniques down to a tee. As well as Trinder, we also get performances from Stanley Holloway as The Great Vance and Betty Warren as music hall owner Bessie Bellwood. All three are marvellous, with Bellwood proving to be the heart and soul of the film as the kindly but tough music hall matriarch. Holloway, his star very much in the ascent, is fantastically pompous as Vance, while, as one of the last British film stars to come up through the music halls, Trinder’s performance draws a direct line from the old time traditions to the modern style.
It’s perhaps fair to say that if you have no interest in or tolerance for the music hall tradition, you might find Champagne Charlie a tough watch. But if you have any love of this era, I can scarcely think of a better evocation of it on film. Director Alberto Cavalcanti (credited here under his surname alone) drops the viewer right in the audience, with frequent cuts to patrons enjoying a singalong and stuffing their faces with copious amounts of booze and food. The sets are shabbily ornate in their depiction of faded glamour, a perfect backdrop for the grubby hedonism of music hall abandon. Champagne Charlie’s best sequence is an ingenious musical montage in which we switch between two different music halls to see snippets of performances by Leybourne and Vance, each one dedicated to a different alcoholic beverage. It depicts the sort of showbiz oneupmanship that still occurs to this day, with two cocky performers trying desperately to outdo each other at their art while refusing to admit each other’s mutual influence.
Champagne Charlie continues the pattern in the Tommy Trinder filmography of making him part of an ensemble rather than foregrounding him alone, as had been the way with his predecessors Gracie Fields and George Formby. While his approach could occasionally make Trinder stick out a bit amongst his less boisterous cast mates, Champagne Charlie proves to be the perfect vehicle for his talents, placing his character on a stage for much of the runtime. Ironically, Trinder ends up giving one of his quieter performances, tapping into a real sense of Leybourne’s doubts, misgivings and fears as well as his growing confidence and charismatic showmanship. The fact that this is the only film Trinder made for Ealing in which his character was not named Tommy is an indication of its status as a greater acting challenge for the comedian, one to which he rises admirably.
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