Old Mother Riley Detective

What we have in movies today is a process of complex evolution. If you want to understand movies — a necessary condition for a lucid life, I maintain — you have to get some sort of a handle on that evolution. Many of the forces involved are simple market forces, and those are quite different in the UK compared to the US.

British movies ran longer in theaters and were always double features. One feature was intended to be the real entertainment and the other filler. But filler of a different order than in America.

American filler was meant to engage by continuation mostly. Serials, cartoons and other shorts are more distilled versions of the main fare, and that distillation referenced other movies more overtly than the main fare would. They're interesting even when they seem ordinary and poorly produced.

The British film-goer was a different beast. Americans actually watched, Brits didn't. British shorts were derived from stage acts that served a similar purpose, keeping the stage warm while the audience visited themselves, settled and canoodled.

The less good these are, the more making out you can imagine, so the Mother Riley projects could be responsible for many folks walking around today.

This is the first I've seen. If you don't know them, they feature a father-daughter team. The father is in drag in the person of Mother Riley, creating a caricature of an excitable biddy who jabbers and contorts. The daughter is amazingly unattractive, profoundly. She plays a singer without overt comedy but with as much irony as her dad playing her mom.

Its all horrible. But I think it is engineered to be so. If it were interesting, engaging, actually funny the audience would rebel. The theater experience is about more than good movies, you know. Was, anyway.

This episode has the biddy tracking down thieves stealing wartime food rations ("from children"). Its mildly interesting to imagine a guy pretending to be a woman which adopts the Miss Marple persona and in turn pretends to be something else to solve the case.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Lucan and Mcshane were a big turn on the halls.they were originally brought to the screen by John Blakely of Mancunian Films.they were subsequently lured away by John Baxter at British National.During the war this company was a big player and they also had Flanagan and Allen making films for them.whatever company they were at the standard of production was fairly threadbare and this film was no exception.I have to say that it is rather difficult to find these films funny more like irritating.However there are moments when Lucan goes into one of his tirades that you see the real gold of music hall and at that moment he transcends his material.

I have concluded that watching Old Mother Riley movies, like eating live frogs, should best be done first thing in the morning, to ensure that nothing worse will happen in your day. Unfortunately, by the time I noticed the availability for viewing of this movie, I had been up for some time, and it clashed with my dictum of getting unpleasant tasks out of the way as soon as possible.

In this one, Lancashire lad Arthur Lucan, who impersonated Old Mother Riley in drag, with his wife, Kitty McShane, playing his daughter, gets involved in tracking down black marketeers, His Majesty's police and spies being unable to do it on their own. There was clearly some money spent on this movie. Miss McShane introduces two songs, and there is a goodly amount of location shooting. Nonetheless the usual process shots, looping and other means of keeping production costs down are both obvious and destructive of any comedy.

It is true that the Old Mother Riley movies were enormously popular. Lucan had been voted the second most popular British screen personality in 1941, and he would appear as the character 17 times on the screen, with another movie planned when he collapsed on stage and died. Nonetheless, even with my old-fashioned taste for slapstick, I find the character, series and this movie irritating. The character screeches, and never ceases her stream of malapropisms; there is nothing to put me on the character's side except the writer-mandated inevitable success. The routine may have once been popular, but its time has long gone, and the lack of anything worthwhile in this film other than that outdated shtick should consign it to the trash heap.

It represented a promotion of sorts from assistant and technical advisor on three previous Old Mother Riley films to actually directing British cinema's third biggest box office attraction of 1942, but for Lance Comfort it was fortunately merely a springboard to far far better things.

Forgetting the centuries old antipathy of the Irish to the English (along with her accent much of the time) Mother Riley does her bit for the war effort by going undercover to foil a gang of black marketeers (while talking so much Arthur Lucan actually gets as an Additional Dialogue credit).

The verbal sparring between mother & daughter when "Mrs Riley's little daughter" Kitty (as usual dressed like Baby Jane Hudson) when the garrulous old crone embarrasses her in an upmarket restaurant carries an edge that probably derives from the Lucans' well-known real-life propensity for rowing in public; while her increasingly frequent asides to the camera are also acquiring a sinister edge.