User reviews

Jack Buchanan and Jean Gilie have just gotten engaged. There are two problems: she's got a mother and he's already got a fiancée, the bossy and horsey Marjorie Brooks. Fortunately, he's got two practical-joking pals, one of whom is married to Jack's usual stage partner, Elsie Randolph. She's always available for cross-talk, dancing and solving the problem of who's forging the French bank notes which have the flics on Jack's trail.

It's all enjoyable nonsense, based on a Buchanan-Randolph stage show, co-written by Guy Bolton. The performances are great, and Miss Randolph has a dance number that clearly was a show-stopper on stage, the sexy "You've Got the Wrong Rhumba", danced in a tight bolero outfit. However, while director Herbert Wilcox had clearly seen what RKO had been doing with the Astaire-Rogers musicals, he hadn't completely gotten the idea of how to shoot dance numbers, tending to not keep dancing partners together on the screen and constricting the field of vision to focus on Miss Randolph for her solo.

It doesn't matter too much. If you enjoy singing, dancing and silliness, you'll like this.

It is unfortunate that one of Buchannan's best films,Break The News,has never been on DVD,or shown on tv .Two showings at the BFI are all that has been seen of this film. So in a sense we must be grateful for those of his films which did get shown on tv and are available for us to see.

Maybe it would have been better if a director with a musical flair had directed this.

The previous comment is the second review I have read from that particular user, and although everyone is entitled to their opinion, it must be pointed out that they are trying to judge the humour of that era by todays standards and it cannot be done. They are two completely different animals.

This'll Make You Whistle is a celluloid testament to England of the 1930's. It was an era I never saw first hand as I was not born until '73, but its an era for which I hold great affection. The art deco fashions, the music, the gentleman's clubs, the spacious London apartments and the night clubs complete with brylcremed band-leader and orchestra. Now do you see where I am coming from..it's a completely different world than we live in today, but one I would be happy to revert to if it were only possible.

What appeals to me about this film is that Jack Buchanan and his friends are able to have a four day party with plenty of booze, which climaxes in an hotel in Le Touquet. All of this presumably costing a bomb by 1930's standards and (here is the best bit) completely uninterrupted by the very work commitments that must have paid for it all. I presumed they must have all got the sack when they returned to England!!!!

As for the nightclub scene and the "black baby" incident mentioned by my predecessor on this page, again it was a different world then. There were very few black people in England at the time and the crazy and incredibly annoying world of political correctness had yet to invade our society. It may not be a welcomed scene in a movie for our multi-cultural society today, but back then it must have been guffaw funny. I still find it so for I can see the joke for what it is and in the context in which it was meant. It wasn't offensive for the age as there was no-one to find it offensive and I think people ought to remember that before they try and write it off as a racist slur.

The songs...ahhh the songs. Not too good really are they. The tunes are great but are let down by the cliché lyrics like "..birds of feather...getting together...." (sung rather inappropriately to the lead characters - best friends - wife no less.)In addition to this, these lyrics were deemed soooooo good they actually feature in TWO songs. Such was Buchanan's confidence in them...oh dear.

However again they are not songs written for the pop charts of 2004 and in the innocent days of 1936, if they got your foot tapping then they had served their purpose and had provided the entertainment required to help lift you out of the depression.

A funny story with an almost cartoon existence makes this a pleasant eighty odd minutes to be savored on a quite afternoon, especially for the older generation. If you haven't seen it before then I'm sure it will take you right back to that bygone age and your own fond memories of the day. If you have then This'll Make You Whistle all over again.

Scottish song-and-dance man Jack Buchanan made a few Hollywood films, but spent most of his career on the London stage, starring in frothy West End musical comedies. "This'll Make You Whistle" is not among his better films, but it holds a unique place in Buchanan's career. Buchanan starred in the stage version and the movie version of "This'll Make You Whistle" concurrently, reporting to the film studio in the mornings and afternoons (except on matinée days) and then rushing to the West End for the evening performances onstage. Even more surprisingly, the film version of "This'll Make You Whistle" actually played in West End cinemas during the run of the stage show, thus putting the two versions in competition with each other! This movie survives as our best record of what a typical Jack Buchanan musical must have looked like onstage: it's all froth and candyfloss, with no substance and no songs of more than passing interest.

Most of Buchanan's London stage musicals were too inconsequential to merit transfer to Broadway. In America, the film version of "This'll Make You Whistle" had the bad luck to open during the weekend of the 1938 "Martian" radio broadcast by Orson Welles ... so it flopped, but it likely would have flopped anyway.

"This'll Make You Whistle" has a larger-than-usual budget for a British movie musical of this period, and it manages to "open up" the stage material with some large-ish sets. The film stars Buchanan as a glib playboy; he and his pals Archie and Reggie are always mucking about and getting into trouble. David Hutcheson, as Archie, has a long horse-like face which makes him look quite funny (he resembles the French comedian Fernandel) except in one bizarre scene in which Hutcheson and Buchanan disguise themselves with long black beards in order to blend in with a long queue of identically-dressed men in long black beards. This looks like a scene from a Doctor Seuss story, but it manages to be weird rather than funny. Hutcheson had one of the most comical faces ever to go in front of a movie camera; by covering his face with a false beard, he becomes *less* funny, not more so.

There's a very tasteless scene in a nightclub, in which Buchanan's buddies borrow a baby so that they can pass it off as Buchanan's child, to discourage some woman from getting romantically involved with him. Buchanan claims paternity of the child without taking a look at the baby first. Then we see a close-up of "his" baby boy ... and the baby is black. Racial humour is SO sophisticated. Not half! (Yes, this joke was offensive even in 1936, because we're meant to laugh at Buchanan's humiliation when circumstances make it seem that -- gasp! shock! -- he might have had sex with a black woman.)

Anthony Holles is hilarious in a supporting role as a very respectable businessman who never once in his entire life has ever put pleasure ahead of business ... "and look where it got me!" splutters Holles, before joining Buchanan for a night on the tiles.

Jack Buchanan made a lot of money during his years of stardom, but (unlike so many other wealthy people in show-biz) he was also extremely generous to his co-workers and chorus dancers who made so much less money than himself. Most of his money was gone by the time of his long slow death from cancer.

"This'll Make You Whistle" is more interesting as a social document than as a comedy: it's a fair example of what Grandpa laughed at, in the days between the World Wars. The songs, alas, are too few and not very good. Several other British comedians of this period (George Formby, Max Miller, Ivor Novello) had much better musical material than Jack Buchanan usually got. I'll rate this movie 2 points in 10.