Summary
It would be a hard heart that resisted its childish charm, or the sudden burst of ersatz Hollywood glamour when Balfour appears in a wedding gown of startling splendour, as her working-class neighbours release hundreds of balloons into a sky filled with some sort of hope
SquibsHis Majesty and Co.
Things Are Looking Up
In Town Tonight
Oh, Daddy!
Street Song
Radio Pirates
Variety
Off the Dole
Heat Wave
Hello Sweetheart
Squibs
The Divine Spark
Look Up and Laugh
Dance Band
Cock o’ the North
Charing Cross Road
Me and Marlborough
The Student’s Romance
Heart’s Desire
Jimmy Boy
The Deputy Drummer
Car of Dreams
Honeymoon for Three
A Fire Has Been Arranged
Invitation to the Waltz
Music Hath Charms
No Limit
Father O’Flynn
First a Girl
I Give My Heart
Hyde Park Corner
Come Out of the Pantry
She Shall Have Music
Two Hearts in Harmony
January
The year begins interestingly with His Majesty & Co., a modest piece directed by Anthony Kimmins for Fox Films, but ‘a charming musical trifle, showing a delightful and typical English sense of humour’. It was in sharp contrast to Kimmins’s other 1935 project for Fox, Once in a New Moon, a sort of science fiction story set in middle England, with faint hints of things to come in R. C. Sherriff’s fascinating 1939 novel The Hopkins Manuscript (why did a British studio never turn it into a movie?). Sally Sutherland’s screenplay for His Majesty & Co. told the story of John (John Garrick), holidaying in the Ruritanian principality of Poldavia and falling for the oddly named Princess Sandra (Barbara Waring). Returning to Britain, he meets not only the princess but her parents (Morton Selten and Mary Grey). As the King is a wine expert and the Queen a decent cook, they get together to open a restaurant, where John can also sing at table. The by-now-ubiquitous Wally Patch as Bert Hicks represents the lower orders. The music is by Viennese Wilhelm Grosz, another émigré escaping from the Nazis, and probably best known as the composer of ‘Red Sails In The Sunset’. Alfredo Campoli and His Tzigane Orchestra and speciality act Betty le Brocke were on hand to take the audience’s mind off this unlikely tale.
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- Cheer Up!British Musical Films, 1929-1945, pp. 118 - 147Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020