The plot line is astonishing, the suspense is unbearable, the ending is masterly... Oh sorry, I meant the story of how George Formby's movie debut ever came to happen in the first place. Normally a film half as bad as this would have been forgotten overnight. But it is much more than just a curio-clip for the George Formby Society. It makes an intriguing drama in itself.
In a broadcast just before his death, Formby said he had been traipsing round the film studios, where nobody knew him or wanted him. Then by chance, he met a producer who had admired his double-act with his wife Beryl, and said he'd like them to star in a film, if only he had a story. Happily, they were able to show him a script they'd been working on, and a new career was launched.
Even the popularity of his later and better films is hard enough to explain. Truly staggering is that the crowds queued round the block for this amateur effort, completed in a fortnight in one room above a garage, where they kept having to ask the mechanics to turn the engines off while they were recording! Formby plays a gormless character called John Willie that his father had originally made famous in the music-halls. Here he's employed as a hotel shoeshine boy who can't even perform this simple job properly. This leads to some predictable Chaplinesque scenes, with the usual pompous manager feeling mortally insulted, until he overhears George and Beryl singing a duet, and wonders if their talents might be put to better use...
The shortcomings are simply too numerous to list. Whole scenes that don't relate to anything before or after. Wildly improbable situations, like John Willie being left in charge of the hair-salon. Odd fragments of sub-plot that are easily missed altogether. Overlong cross-talk routines that are embarrassingly unfunny.
As with all the big prewar UK film hits, the musical numbers are far superior to the story lines that link them (if they do). Whenever George appears, you know there's a ukulele somewhere within reach. And Beryl gets a chance to show her dancing skills too. This is one of only two film appearances ever made by Beryl, and many have commented that she's no actress. These critics obviously know little of the real Mrs. Formby, who was her husband's domineering manager, and who pops-up in showbusiness memoirs as the wicked witch of the film-set, too often for it to be coincidence. In fact, it was claimed that she deleted a scene showing the teenage Betty Driver, because she could out-dance Beryl, although Betty can actually be seen in the long-lost full-length version. Either way, be assured - Beryl's performance as the simple and sentimental scullery-maid is fine acting indeed.
