London Town

Rank's ruinously expensive attempt to make a film star out of West End sensation Sid Field immediately acquired legendary status when it crashed and burned with both critics and at the boxoffice taking with it the career of director Wesley Ruggles and setting back that of Kay Kendal for several more years.

Predating British film comedies of the fifties and sixties which showcased British television comedians in Technicolor, like most really bad films the biggest sin 'London Town' commits is the one of simply being very dull, to the extent that for the next fifteen years it was produced as Exhibit 'A' whenever the case was argued that the British simply couldn't make musicals.

Great Britain has made some really good movies over the years - comedies especially. Also war movies. BUT! their first venture into musicals, LONDON TOWN, was nothing short of a disaster. The acting was bad, the direction worse and as for the songs!! Diabolical. I class it just below THE ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES in my list of the worst movies of all time.

Interesting today mainly as a historical record of the Music Hall (Vaudeville to our American cousins), this is fairly slow and unfunny when not actually showing the performances.

Featuring Sid Field, a big star of the thirties and forties. He had a pleasant light singing voice but his act included a Golf Lesson routine not in the class of his namesake, W.C. Two-ton Tessie O'Shea, literally a big star, showed that she had lots of personality and there's an enjoyable Pearlie Kings act with `Any Old Iron?' etc.

Surprisingly in (pretty gaudy) colour.

London Town is a must see for any other Greta Gynt fans out there. Her saucy madam with the chestnut hair is about as far removed from the icy blonde femme fetales she played in the 30s as can be! It took about half of the film before I really recognised her. Kay Kendall is also splendid in her role, as is a very small Petula Clark. Petula is Peggy, whose father is an out of work comedian. She plays a trick on the other comedian, so that he'll have to miss a night and give her father his big break. Watch out for Belgrave as well - he steals every scene he's in!

The movie is fairly light on plot, most of the time being made up with the stage numbers, some of which get a bit long (the golf one...good at first but soon I was dying!), but over all it's a lot of fun. I'm sure I could have though of a better ending, though!

For the first few scenes I couldn't understand why this production had a bad name: the film was interesting, engaging, affectionate -- even funny. Sid Field's impromptu staging of "You Can't Keep A Good Dreamer Down" (evidently a domestic bed-time tradition) is very enjoyable, and the segue into the dream sequence which ends with him arriving on the stage of the theatre -- and waking up! -- is ingenious and well done. Even if nowadays the rooftop dance carries inevitable echoes of "Mary Poppins", these can scarcely be laid at the door of a 1946 production.

At the theatre the first of the film's plot revelations proves equally effective, and the important sparring relationship is established between the show's lead comedian, hypochondriac Charlie De Haven, and its producer, the elegant Mrs Barry. In fact, as long as the action stays behind the scenes it doesn't go far wrong, though the vagaries of the plot mean that Kay Kendall is rarely seen out of the heavy stage make-up which makes her look older and harder than her nineteen years, and her romantic relationship with Jerry Ruggles, the hero, is a bit arbitrary.

It's unclear why stage star Sonnie Hale was engaged to play the rival comedian, since the plot never actually allows us to see the character's stage performance. However, the part makes good use of his acting talents, especially in scenes with Mrs Barry (a glamorous Greta Gynt) and with Charlie's long-suffering dresser Belgrave (an outstanding turn from Claude Hulbert), and acid put-downs against the unfortunate Jerry are deployed to entertaining effect. Jerry Desmonde (Sid Field's real-life 'straight man') also makes a favourable impression as urbane George, the other half of the act.

And while it's always risky to rely on child actors to play a pivotal part in the plot, Petula Clark is note-perfect here as Jerry's daughter. In the absence of a mother-figure (the former Mrs Ruggles evidently long deceased) the two of them form a convincingly close unit, with the little girl alternately managing her father with a briskly adult air or engaging in mutually childish behaviour. Her trips to the joke-shop are adroitly established before it turns out to be crucial to the outcome of the story, and Petula Clark does a brilliant job of depicting her increasingly uneasy conscience as she realises that her prank on Charlie has had more serious consequences than she had ever intended. (The film rose somewhat in my estimation as a result of this: most comedies of this genre would just sweep the issue under the carpet on the grounds that anyone who is unpleasant to the hero deserves anything he gets...)

Sid Field himself is perfectly adequate as Jerry, although with hindsight I do feel that he and Kay Kendall are rather overshadowed by the strong supporting cast -- but my main complaint against Sid Field would be that, as a comedian, his act simply didn't entertain me at all.

A large chunk of the running-time of "London Town" is taken up with either musical production numbers or comedy sketches, representing the material being performed on stage by the cast. The musical numbers start off reasonably entertaining -- "My Heart Goes Crazy" is a generic springtime number with a nice ironic touch -- but seemed to get more tedious as they went on. Either my patience was decreasing, or the (American) director and song-writers' idea of 'London' got harder and harder to swallow as it got into more and more clichéd and unconvincing territory. Meanwhile, the comedy sketches, which are supposedly an irreplaceable record of Field's stage act, are presented in a straight-through-the-proscenium-arch format and a dead soundtrack that kills whatever amusement value they may have had in the first place.

I have to admit that on the basis of this film I don't 'get' Sid Field as a comedian at all. Fast-talking Max Miller is amusing in the pre-war "Friday the Thirteenth" and "The Good Companions", as is Sonnie Hale himself with partner Jessie Matthews in "First a Girl". Field's own act seems to rely on relentless repetition to ensure that even those 'at the back of the gallery' will eventually follow the joke, coupled with a comedy based around errors, failures and ineptitude, a style that I'm afraid I've always personally disliked. The infamous 'photographer' sketch with its blatantly homosexual overtones is probably the funniest, mainly because the humour is character-based (the client complaining pettishly 'But I've always wanted to see his kitchen!') rather than revolving around slapstick or laboured misinterpretations.

But the film has other issues, among them clumsy sound-track editing and lip-synch, and some very fake outdoors scenery: bizarrely, it also contains some beautiful location work that not only provides an invaluable Technicolor archive record of the River Thames on a sunny summer's day but demonstrates a rather more subtle sense of humour into the bargain. (Keep an eye out for the sly social observations concerning the holiday-makers in the boats...)

The full-length release of "London Town" is currently available for free viewing at the NFT 'Mediatheque', split into a 90-minute and a 35-minute section due to limitations on maximum viewing length: this makes it all the more obvious, alas, that the plot is effectively over after ninety minutes! There is actually a good deal to like in this production: it's just that the most successful parts of the film are not those which were intended to sell it as a grandiose post-war celebration. Keep the existing story, strip out and/or replace almost all the on-stage stuff, and you'd probably get an entertaining and unassuming seventy-minute picture. As a two-hour spectacle it is hopelessly overblown.