Toujours vingt ans

Evergreen is an old evergreen favourite of mine, now 70 years young and rising. Jessie Matthews sparkles but as usual Sonnie Hale tinkles.

It's got a typically bizarre 30's British film plot, but it's handled in a defter way than was usual to help suspend your disbelief for the required 90 minutes. Illegitimate 20 yo daughter of deceased famous Music Hall singer comes from obscurity to impersonate her and gains fame as a result, the decent looking chap she's falling for (and vv) finds himself having to impersonate her non-existent son while her real father comes out of the woodwork after 20 years and starts to blackmail them. And for thousands of pounds a time in todays money - nice man!

Of course this is all merely filler for the Rodgers & Hart songs, none greater than Dancing On The Ceiling, a sublime and surreal 4 minutes than grows more beautiful every time I see it. Jessie never used her beautiful cut glass voice to better effect. She was supposed to be a great dancer but I've not seen any evidence of it yet in her films, but this is probably as close as she ever will come to impressing me in that department. I'm always mindful of Dirk Bogarde's personal assessment of her dancing talents in the BBC documentary about her that he narrated in the early '90's that she was better than Ginger Rogers, and that she was a success in the US because of this. Again, Rogers had her own style - maybe Jessie was better in a chorus line; to me she danced like an ostrich on an escalator, her flying feet competition only to Charlotte Greenwood or Jackie Chan. Having said that, I could watch her films until the cows came home, they're all pleasant with good music, good dancing and good stories - sometimes!

Watch this and marvel - that anyone as vital as she could die in obscurity in a nursing home and be buried unmarked in an obscure cemetery.