The Sun Never Sets.

 The Sun Never Sets.

Pre-WW2 English film tends to be a surprising black hole in our cinema knowledge. We hear about the protectionist Quota Films Act, which made it viable to sell shoddy productions by the foot to meet the required Theatre Time of home -grown product. However, getting to see these is another matter. They were never re-issued and rarely printed up in the small film gages, which were the home video of the day. The British Film Institute tended to consider early production beneath their dignity. Though I lived a bus ride away from the London NFT, it wasn't till the Paris Cinémathèque did an English season that I saw titles like Pastor Hall, the Victor McLaglen Tower of London and the Maurice Elvey-Leslie Howard The Gentle Sex.  When British TV arrived, it showed minimal interest, though it would find space for even more tacky fifties efforts. Without prompting, a new generation of critics never enquired. 

It was assumed that the bulk of this material, quota quickies and more substantial efforts alike, had vanished. However market forces, in the succeeding forms of domestic video and streaming came riding up the hill. Titles unseen for more than half a century became available. Rank's Gaumont British product surfaced here when the ABC bought their library, presumably eyeing the Dirk Bogarde vehicles, and more recently Canal Plus has made a deal with the English Network label to make available another substantial set of titles, including Ealing and ABPC efforts that had made their way into their hands.

Hopes of finding lost masterpieces have largely proved unjustified but these films do have another value as a record of a lost pre-war world of Empire Rule, top-hatted toffs showing cloth-capped menials their proper place, Ivor Novello and Jessie Matthews, Music Hall, the British Broadcasting Corporation and threepenny comics. It may be less involving than the one populated by white hat cowboys, Broadway chorines and lantern-jawed G-Men but it is useful to know that this is a picture that a previous generation accepted and often considered a more suitable role model. It has its own fascination.

These generally arrive as sharp well-graded multi-title box sets. I now feel an obligation towards those, to which, curiously, YouTube has now added the imagined forever-lost 1932 Illegal, made for Warner British at their Teddington operation and directed by William McGann with minimal ambition and surviving in a good and apparently complete copy. After their home market showing, it had been common practice to hack a couple of reels out of the edited negatives and ship them to the 'States to provide first halves - never to be seen again. 

   Elsom

In Illegal, the then Mrs. Maurice Elvey, Isobel Elsom stars as the wife of rotter D.A. Clarke-Smith (from the thirties Man Who Knew Too Much), who she has to rescue from cheated bookie Wally Patch, so we move into the plot of Michael Curtiz’ silent The Maddona of Ave. A, shortly later again recycled for Marcel Carné’s debut, Jenny. Isabel uses unexpected winnings on the ponies to open the Scarecrow Club, a sly grog dive with a roulette wheel concealed in a birthday cake. This funds the education of her two daughters at Margaret Damer’s boarding school for better-class young women, on the condition that the other parents must never know about Isabel’s shady profession. 

She of course has a heart of gold, returning his losses to the nineteen-year-old punter and baring him from the wheel. I thought he might show up again. The  peelers take a dim view and, profiting from the club’s lax membership policy, gain admission. Elsom’s loyal associate Ivor Barnard recognises them too late to stop a raid, after which Isabel is thrown in the slammer. Seeing her photo in the paper,  the daughters, now grown (shot of stocking-ed feet touching - dissolve to larger size) to be judgemental blonde Margot Grahame (later in the U.S for The Informer and a Three Musketeers’ Milady) and more sensitive Moira Lynd  leave their posh school and resolve to use their well to do connections to attract customers to a legitimate use of the venue, with the big draw card being Grahame, in grotesque Louis Brooks' glamour outfits, singing then standard “Can’t We Talk It Over?”  

Elsom & Barnard - Scarecrow Club

Dad Clarke-Smith shows up again and Grahame moves off into her own flat, where he gropes her, precipitating a car smash.  Nice sister Lind has a (colorless middle-aged) Nob boy friend who pairs with her despite the scandal and Elsom, getting a fortnight time-off for good behaviour, comes back to the club and uses the obviously planted benzine that Barnard is cleaning the drapes with to burn the place down - as if that made any sense.

The US-imported department heads give the piece a mechanical smoothness (dissolving from the roulette wheel spinning to locomotive valve gears pumping) lacking in many of the minor British films of the day, an interesting comparison with parallel Michael Powell efforts, but they never catch the setting in any involving way. Brief, evocative location inserts, like the newspaper seller's street poster, the first exterior of a neighborhood pub in fog or a London cab parked outside Wandsworth Women’s prison may be the work of  British second cameraman  Cyril J. Knowles. Vintage vehicle enthusiasts will have a good innings. 

This one has the off-putting, squalid quality which persists in later English film - Gainsborough costume melo, Blue Lamp, Room at the Top, Movie Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. Elsom was much livelier as a Spanish Courtesan in Elvey's silent The Wandering Jew. After their divorce, she would settle into doing haughty matrons in Hollywood, films like Ladies in Retirement.

In the Studio Canal collection, director Graeme Cutts' altogether more substantial Over She Goes, of 1937, is a determinedly British musical, which seems to have escaped from Shaftesbury Avenue. A plot about stealing an incriminating letter involves disguising star Stanley Lupino as a missing uncle, back from South America. Think “Charley’s Aunt” and there’s a bit of Mabel’s Room and the common veranda outside the women’s bedrooms from the Willy Forst Alotria.

Large, glossy family estate set and a Fox-Hunting opening after which heir John Wood, a juvenile not outclassed by Lupino & (the most effective) Laddie Cliff  - veterans who have honed their talent on the ‘Halls - all carry in their respective love interests Clare Luce, Sally Gray & Gina Malo, after falling off their horses to get the boys to propose (!) Complications when Wood’s one-time squeeze Judy Kelly threatens a breach of promise action, though she had been the one to throw him over when he was just part of the struggling vaudeville trio. Cliff, the brainy one’s solution is to have a disguised Lupino pass himself off as his lost-believed-dead uncle, whose appearance would mean Wood would lose the inherited family fortune. Kelly’s vengeful American fiancé, heavyweight champion Max Bear, towers over everyone and is perfectly adequate for his part in the complications - about the time he played lead in Wellman’s superior The Prizefighter & the Lady.

Developments involve Police Inspector Syd Walker, who is stuck with Oxford-educated Sergeant Richard Murdock, and aunt Berthe Belmore, trying to unravel the disappearance of the revived uncle. The mechanically perfected dance routines in the gleaming white interiors are interchanceable and it comes as a relief when a carload of Walker’s singing Bobies takes us out of doors into the estate gardens. The pace is maintained, the numbers exactly drilled. There are a few OK bits of well-rehearsed comic business and the women are plausibly glamorous, suggesting they could have carried more of the load. Lab work is less polished with the shaky lighthouse matte and heavy grain on the opticals.

Things are undermined by the impression that the Brits are trying to demonstrate that they can keep up with overseas frivolity.

Less ambitious is Music Hath Charms of 1936, also included in Studio Canal's "British Musicals of the 1930s Volume 1 Box set" with Thomas Bentley credited as supervising director. This one is a shapeless musical with a spray of subplots related to BBC Dance Orchestra leader Henry Hall’s birthday, where his broadcast is picked up in a variety of locations. After the band celebrates it by serenading under the window of his suburban home, he takes carloads of children on a countryside holiday where he is mistaken for an escaped loony.

   Music Hath Charms - Hall & kids.

The musical numbers are spaced by sub plots - a breach of promise action in mugging Judge Aubrey Mallalieu ’s court, restless natives advancing on the pair of British pith helmet types offering their native  boy “Plenty kicks backside” in the African wilds, ocean going busybody Edith Sharpe interfering with a philandering pair and causing a shipboard panic and the marriage-shy mountain climber couple united by a rope cutting accident before meeting rustic Herbert Lomas. These in turn interlock, as with gunfire in the jungle cut to target shooting on board.

Nobody shines and it’s impossible to attribute the contributions of later-notable talents, Ronald Neame and Arthur Woods included. Equally feeble drama & jokes are erratically inserted between the cheery, now forgotten numbers but there is one nice sequence where the musicians trickle back from the countryside fiasco to their BBC live broadcast, which Hall has begun on solo piano. The film’s implausible account of thirties radio gives it some interest - more than the occasional bursts of production value (an enormous kids motorcade rolling through London or police and guardsmen marching to the sound of Hall’s broadcast.

He’s confident enough to compete with Kay Kyser and Harry James in the then-current band leader movie star cycle.

Like the recent surge in unfamiliar Hollywood early sound film on YouTube, these productions are a significantly underdocumented source and I enjoy investigating them. Watch this space!

Music Hath Charms - Carol Goodner

 

 

Barrie  Pattison - 2026