You Lucky People!

You've got to wonder about a British film environment which throws up this potboiler and leaves Maurice Elvey's more accomplished films in obscurity. Indeed archiving raises the old question. Is something lost when you know where it is.

YOU LUCKY PEOPLE is the last film to star Tommy Trinder in a lack lustre movie career. He was considered a major player by the producers and swallowed a large slice of the budget. Trinder's material is dispiriting,breaking the narrative flow with routines that were never all that funny when developed probably for other uses. It comes as a surprise to find him bursting into song in the finale.

Plot covers army reservists called back for training with Trinder having made his bundle in war surplus since being demobbed.

Production values are respectable though the use of the cut price anamorphic lens, the first sound film to be shot in "scope" black and white, seems to have minimised editing with many scenes a single run of the camera. Dora Bryan's footage is better covered and she comes out of things more effectively than the largely nonentity cast around her.