by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ran a really quirky 1943 British wartime
musical he’d downloaded from an online source called Miss London, Ltd. It was a vehicle for an inexplicably popular British
comedian named Arthur Askey, and it was produced under impressive auspices —
the Gainsborough company, in partnership with Gaumont-British, with Michael
Balcon as studio head, Edward Black as producer and Val Guest as director,
co-writer (with Marriott Edgar), and co-songwriter (with Manning Sherwin) —
adding Guest to the short list (Charlie Chaplin, Victor Schertzinger and Clint
Eastwood) of auteurs who’ve
directed, written and scored
their films. It’s a sort of portmanteau musical with some genuinely talented performers and an overall insouciance and a refreshing understanding of just how
preposterous the musical is as a genre — especially when it’s not
about people who sing and dance for a living. It opens with “The 8:50 Choo
Choo,” a big number set in a train station in which the station announcer and
all the porters are women — it was
World War II, you know, and there are signs in the station indicating how train
travel (like just about everything else) was being rationed, including “Don’t
Travel for Pleasure” and “Is This Trip Really Necessary?” It seems as if Val
Guest and Manning Sherwin had seen how popular the “Chattanooga Choo Choo”
number had been for Glenn Miller, both as a record (it wasn’t the first to sell
a million copies but it was the
first to be formally awarded a Gold Record for doing so) and a number in
Miller’s film Sun Valley Serenade,
and decided to emulate it. The train is bringing in Terry Arden (Evelyn Dall),
an American from New York (though we have to take that pretty much on faith —
Dall’s only attempt at an American accent is to speak her lines in a very
clipped, staccato manner) who has just inherited half of a British escort
service — and, this being a movie made under the jurisdiction of the British
Board of Film Censors, “escort” means precisely that and isn’t a euphemism for
prostitution — called “Miss London, Ltd.” Only when she reaches the offices of
Miss London, Ltd. she finds that the premises are dusty, there’s virtually no
business, the girls whose photos are on file are buxom creatures from the turn
of the previous century, and Miss London herself is really Miss London himself, Arthur Bowman (Arthur Askey), who inherited the
business (or his half, anyway) from his mother.
The situation of the American
coming over the Atlantic to inherit a business that turns out to be on its last
legs had been done many times — including the 1935 Astaire-Rogers classic Roberta (adapted from the stage musical that had made Bob
Hope a star) and a number of Laurel and Hardy’s films — but Evelyn Dall,
despite her problematic accent, plays the part with authority and works hard to
recruit new girls to make the business a success. Alas, Arthur and his sidekick
Joe Nelson (Jack Train) have fallen six months’ behind on their rent, so in a
ripoff of the famous scene from Henri Murger’s Scénes de la Vie de
Bohème that did not make it into Puccini’s opera La Bohème, they set up shop on the sidewalk outside (a
situation also used in the big Bojangles Robinson-Fats Waller production
number, “Living in a Great Big Way,” that ends the 1935 RKO musical Hooray
for Love and is the best thing in it) and
try to keep running the business outdoors despite the attempts of an officious
cop to move on. One of the few dates they were actually able to arrange was
between Gail Martin (Anne Shelton, a major music star in Britain — she did the
best record of the song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” and her career
lasted long enough to have at least a tangential connection with the Beatles:
when Brian Epstein opened his big record store on Great Charlotte Street in
Liverpool, he got Shelton to perform at his opening) and Captain Rory O’Moore
(Peter Graves — no, not that
Peter Graves!), a servicemember who wanted female companionship for his one
day’s leave in London. (That part of the story reminded Charles of On
the Town, which didn’t premiere on stage
until a year after this film was
made.) It turns out that O’Moore is the owner of the Hotel Splendide in London,
and he offers Miss London, Ltd. a whole floor in his hotel — but only if they
can obtain a second date for him with Gail, who’s unwilling not only because
she already has a job as the female station announcer we saw in the opening scene
but her first date went poorly. Instead of taking her out O’Moore gave her a
“private supper” in his hotel bedroom and clearly had seduction on his mind —
and Gail’s virtue was saved only by Arthur, who locked the officious waiter
Romero (Max Bacon, playing the part as a Continental — in an American film on
this premise it would have been Eric Blore playing a Brit!) in a hotel closet
and took over, disrupting O’Moore’s plans to get Gail into his bed.
Miss
London, Ltd. is a film a good deal funnier
in its parts than as a whole — its best sequence comes in which, not realizing
that O’Moore is the hotel proprietor they are trying to get in to see, they hit
on the idea of impersonating celebrities. But who? They run through a list of
various big names of the time, including Clark Gable, Jack Benny and his Black
sidekick Rochester (in the post-Michael Jackson era Jack Train’s attempts to
explain why he looks white when he’s “really” Black play a bit differently than
they did in 1943!) and then someone suggests to Arthur Bowman that he
impersonate Arthur Askey — which leads to some marvelously metafictional
dialogue in which Arthur Askey’s character tells us how he can’t stand Arthur
Askey. The celebrities they decide to impersonate are the Marx Brothers, with
Askey as Harpo, Train as Chico and Dall as Groucho — the idea of a woman
(complete with long blonde hair) trying to pass herself off as Groucho just
adds to an already funny scene (certainly we’ve seen less impressive Marx
Brothers impersonations than this!), and of course the whole gag is a ripoff of
the real Marx Brothers’ attempt to get off the ship in Monkey
Business by impersonating Maurice
Chevalier. The Marxmanship continues at the big party celebrating Miss London,
Ltd.’s re-opening in the Hotel Splendide, in which Askey does a piano routine
which begins with him playing the opening of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp
minor — a piece the real Harpo Marx parodied in A Day at the Races. Then he complains that the rest of the piece is too
difficult and goes into Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You.” He’s got placards on
his piano giving the title of each piece in case anyone came late and missed
his announcements, and after the ones reading “Rachmaninoff’s Prelude” and
“Memories” he gets to one labeled “Ladies’ Cloakroom.” There’s suspense over
whether Gail will make it to the party on time — certainly her first date with
O’Moore was not an experience she wanted to repeat — but she does at the very
last minute, and ultimately she and O’Moore pair off for good (or at least
until he returns from his latest deployment), as do Dall and Askey — though
Askey’s draft notices finally catch up with him at the last minute and he’s
clapped into a Navy brig from which Dall says goodbye to him as he ships out.
Askey was a stage performer who in 1938 broke into stardom with a radio show
called Band Waggon (note the
spelling with two “g”’s) which got filmed in 1940 (I commented on it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/10/band-waggon-gaumont-britishgainsborough.html)
as a satire of the monopsony power (for those who missed Econ 102, a monopoly
is a single seller and a monopsony is a single buyer — and in this case it meant the publicly owned
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as the only company to which aspiring British radio performers
could sell their services, and also a war-themed plot line in which they
inadvertently stumble on and foil an attempt by Fifth Columnists to take over
the BBC’s experimental TV station and use it to broadcast Nazi propaganda. This
made him a film star through the 1940’s and into the 1950’s, and when his movie
popularity started to fade he got on TV and hosted a self-named show from 1961
until his retirement (he died in 1982 in London at age 82 from gangrene after
having both legs amputated, which suggests he was severely diabetic — this is
also how Ella Fitzgerald died). His act in Miss London, Ltd. seems to be a bit wearing — he was short (5’ 2”, two
inches shorter than Charlie Chaplin), wore Harold Lloyd-style glasses and could
be a Lee Tracy-ish wise guy and
an effeminate milquetoast — but he’s funny and Guest and co-writer Edgar
fortunately structure their script so we don’t have to look at him for that much of the movie — it’s a vehicle for him but there
are enough strongly etched roles for the other characters, especially the two
women leads, it counts as an ensemble piece. It’s also a skillfully constructed
piece in the way the songs, not particularly memorable in themselves, are
smoothly integrated in the action; though it’s nowhere nearly as good a film as
Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight,
which I still regard as the best
musical movie ever made, bar none, Miss London, Ltd. shares its understanding of the basic artificiality
of the musical genre — the sheer
absurdity of the idea that in the middle of ordinary conversations people will
suddenly stop talking and start singing, and orchestras will magically appear
out of nowhere to accompany them. I like musicals (including the recent La
La Land) that simultaneously exploit the
musical conventions and make fun of them.
