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Highly Overrated But Still Good

Excellent, a Must See

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

A good musical must have some tuneful melodies,reasonable book and not outsmart its welcome.This film fails on all three counts.Furthermore it has Sid Field in the lead.Now whilst this may be a good thing for music hall historians he simply is not up to the lead role in a film.Furthermore if you don't enjoy the humour of his sketches then you really are stuck.He has a good supporting cast in Claude Hulbert Sonnie Hale and Jerry Desmonde.It is difficult to understand why Rank let Wesley Ruggles direct it,then allow it to be released in a version over two hours long.By 1950 Rank was overdrawn by millions of pounds and brought in John Davis to wield the axe.

Over here in the UK, we frequently see scenes from this film on programmes like 'heroes of comedy' or 'Music Hall heroes' - that type of thing. The films star, Sid Field was a very popular (and funny) comedian at the tail end of the variety period before TV appeared and very little film of him was made. So the sketches and 'turns' from London Town are shown as an illustration of him in action. We recently bought the DVD of this film purely to see the snatches of Sid Field in action, as we both find him hilarious in a rather old-fashioned and unsophisticated way. What we weren't prepared for was the pure awfulness of the rest of it - the plot is almost non-existent, the writing and script are poor and the direction is all over the place. Happily, Sid Field in full flow makes up for all of this. OK, I admit that someone tripping up on stage is not the height of comedy class, but he does it so well, and the scene with the camera has me hooting with laughter. So three cheers for Sid, a resounding raspberry for the rest of it!

Petula Clark stars as a young girl in this confused (post-modernist ?) musical, with a whole cast of down-on-their-luck stars producing a variety of songs on some very expensive sets that don't seem to _quite_ make sense.There is evidence of much cutting, particularly in the 'gay' scene (well that's what it looked like to me) which cuts out and runs out of true, but also with the fact that the story is often incoherent and introduces unexplained new elements (such as 'The Amsted Way' ??).The comedy act at the end is terrible, and the lead is as well.Wildly expensively made in Technicolour, perhaps as an experiment ? (Maybe that's why J. Arthur kept in black & white for so long).

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.