Orders Are Orders

Maybe Orders are orders, but service comedies are about disorder. An American film company invades a a British army base to make a Martian-Invasion movie, and proceeds to flimflam the people in charge to get their own way. It's a bit odd to hear Sid James essay a Brooklyn accent as the sleazy producer-director, but he's also got Margot Grahame as his star in a constantly changing role, as Colonel Raymond Huntley's wife,, and gum-chewing Britons of both sexes and scanty costumes abounding. With a rat in the barracks, Tony Hancock trying to practice a military band for a coming competition, Peter Sellers trying to make a few bob on the deal and a general coming to inspect the base, it's extremely frantic and even occasionally funny.

It's clearly a movie made for the British market, and how they landed Miss Grahame for this role is a bit of a mystery to me. It was her last regular film role. Three years later, she would take a part in Preminger's ambitious but ill-fated SAINT JOAN. She had been Britain's highest paid film actress in the 1930s, England's answer to Jean Harlow. Perhaps she had simply had enough and wanted to retire. She died in 1982 at age 80.