St. Martin's Lane, a.k.a. Sidewalks of London (Pommer-Laughton, Mayflower, Renown, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Since the Beatles’ Munich show lasted only 47 minutes, I looked for something to fill in the next hour and a half and found it in St. Martin’s Lane, a 1938 British film issued in the U.S. as Sidewalks of London because the street name would have meant nothing to an American audience. It was produced by Erich Pommer, who had been the head of the German UFA studio during the Weimar Republic but, like a lot of creative Germans, had had to flee when the Nazis took over. (A lot of non-creative, non-celebrity Germans also tried to flee but had a much harder time getting into other countries; even the great director Fritz Lang had trouble with French customs -- which led him to include a bizarre sequence satirizing immigration officials in his 1933 French film Liliom.) Pommer fled to London and hooked up with a major star, Charles Laughton, to form an independent company called Mayflower Pictures (a German producer and a British star started a company and named it after a ship that took religious refugees from Britain to the U.S.!) and release through a British studio called Renown. St, Martin’s Lane deals with London’s buskers -- street entertainers who hang out in front of theatres and movie houses and do their acts for whatever change they can persuade their audiences to give them until the police tell them to move along.

Laughton plays veteran busker Charles Staggers, who chases a woman (Vivien Leigh) who steals sixpence from the hat he’s literally passed after his recitation and then picks the pocket of prominent songwriter Harley Prentiss (Rex Harrison, whose presence definitely marks this as an all-star movie) and grabs his cigarette case after Prentiss has stood them to coffee at an outdoor stand. Charles chases the girl into a deserted mansion that’s up for rent, confronts her and tries to grab the cigarette case from her so he can turn both her and it into the police for a reward, but in the meantime he gets to see her dance (albeit in a half-lit long-shot that made me suspect Leigh had a dance double) and realizes she’d be a major asset to his act. He ends up moving her into his room -- to the predictable distaste of the older couple who run the place (though of course I couldn’t resist a joke about the real Laughton being Gay -- “Vivien, you have nothing to worry about from him!”) -- and she, Charles and two of Charles’ friends, Arthur Smith (Gus McNaughton) and a songwriter named Gentry (Tyrone Guthrie) form a foursome who sing and dance Gentry’s new song, “Wear a Straw Hat in the Rain.”

But the act breaks up almost as soon as it starts when Harley Prentiss returns to the action, thanks Charles for returning his cigarette case, keeps the police from arresting them and offers “Liberty” -- the name Leigh’s character uses -- a tryout for a professional “indoor” show. Liberty gets the job and director Tim Whelan illustrates her rise to stardom through a montage of theatre programs in which she gets higher billing in each show, until she’s ready for a starring vehicle alongside the established male star she was trying to cadge an autograph from in the opening sequence. The show is called A Straw Hat in the Rain and features a big production number based on Gentry’s song, which Prentiss has ripped off and passed off as his own -- and I had thought the plot resolution would involve Charles hearing the number, recognizing the song and getting Gentry to sue for plagiarism. Instead it takes a darker, Sister Carrie-esque turn in which Charles hangs out outside the theatre where Liberty is starring and tries to get her attention -- only he punches out a cop who’s trying to get him to move on and ends up with a four-month prison sentence. Meanwhile Liberty has been having an affair with Prentiss, but it’s hinted that she’s also dating the star of her show and she gets an offer from Hollywood to make films in the U.S. -- and Prentiss tells her he won’t marry her because he knows she’s just using him to advance her career the way she used Charles.

St. Martin’s Lane is an engaging mixture of plot tropes -- the first half reminded me of the 1932 Jessie Matthews vehicle The Good Companions (though that was about buskers in the British countryside, not in London) and the second half evoked comparisons to A Star Is Born from both Charles and I (especially when Charles responds to Liberty’s leaving him by becoming an alcoholic) -- directed by Tim Whelan (who, like the star, was British but had careers on both sides of the Atlantic) from a script by Clemence Dane (though imdb,com credits Laughton, Pommer, Whelan and American playwright Bartlett Cormack with contributions) and isn’t a great film but is a quite charming one. It even features Carroll Gibbons and His Orchestra with a performer I’d actually seen live -- U.S. harmonica player Larry Adler, whom my late partner John and I saw at a free waterfront concert by the San Diego “Pops” Orchestra in 1989 paying tribute to big-band swing. In the 1930’s Adler successfully lobbied the American Federation of Musicians to admit him and declare that the harmonica was a real instrument and not just a toy; on this 1938 tour he not only made this movie in England but stopped over in Paris and did a recording session with Django Reinhardt; and in the early 1950’s he was blacklisted in the U.S. for Left-wing politics, moved to Europe and made a comeback playing on the soundtrack of fellow blacklistee Jules Dassin’s French crime thriller Rififi.