Let the People Sing

Emigree Czech Alastair Sim and fading music hall comicEdward Rigby are on the run through a misunderstanding, and wind up in an English town where a music hall is a fading tradition, its theater the prize between two groups, one who want to use it for a plastics concern, and the other who want to turn it into a museum. What place has music in such a philistine world?

This adaptation of the J.B. Priestley novel has about 80% of its satire thrown out, and the plot doesn't even begin until the movie is halfway over, because the first half is pleasantly taken up with music and a terrific comic performance by Fred Emney as the local avatar of the Empire: drunk and amiable at night, starched and frightening by morning and, in his own words, "wrong all over the world." Like many a comedy, it's at its best while just being silly and paying as little attention to the plot as possible.