Time Flies

I've always enjoyed this Tommy Handley outing, in the year of grace 1943 he was at the height of his ITMA popularity. It remains a rather bizarre film to have been made during WW2, but of course would have served a purpose as a morale booster as well as being simply simple fun.

In modern Manhattan Tommy sponsors Professor Felix Aylmer's Time Ball, a huge silver ball/ space-time -ship, and eventually they, Evelyn Dall and George Moon end up in Elizabethan England - to absolutely everyone's consternation. They have some hilarious escapades, heavy with deliberate anachronisms, but it's Tommy's film - without his incessant witticisms it would have been a pretty poor show. Sometimes it falls flat, other times it's pure genius at work - at a tense life or death fraught moment he suddenly worries about having left the rice pudding "on". The scene where the four of them escape from prison from under Really Raleigh's nose - and how! - is breathtaking stuff for 1943.

To most people it's probably dated badly, but to me the salvageable bits are a treasure, and the hokey bits bearable.