Starring:
GEORGE FORMBY
Produced by MICHAEL BALCON for EALING STUDIOS
Directed by MARCEL VARNEL
Britain in the early 1940's had two heroes: the man with the big cigar and the chap with the small banjo. Winston Churchill and George Formby, and very soon Tommy Handley in ITMA, stood for the grin- and-bear it attitude of a country resisting conquest. That's the flavour that Let George Do It (1940) still preserves.
Knowing what we now know about the war, it might seem tasteless to set a knockabout farce in Occupied Europe, or at least in neutral Norway on the eve of Germany's invasion. But the film survives because it's so innocent of everything except a desire to land a patriotic punch on the Führer's face - which George does in a dream sequence - and, into the bargain, it's an excellent example of Formby's uninhibited upbeatness, making unlikely material work for him.
He plays a ukulele player re-routed in an Intelligence mix-up to Bergen instead of Blackpool, and staying on to strum such morale-boosting numbers as Grandad's Flannelette Nightshirt and break the code that the quisling bandleader -played by Gary Marsh, (who else?) - is transmitting to the Nazis.
Luck, speed and high spirits - the Formby film formula - create the usual obstacle race, including a chase through a bakery where he's almost put in an oven with the dough, to the point where he collects the waiting maiden (Phyllis Calvert) and no doubt the nation's thanks, too.
One can easily see why George was 'let do it' in British films. His timing is immaculate. His Northern shrewdness, which says' I may look gormless but I'm nobody's fool,' wears better than more sentimental comics who grabbed for one's heart strings - the only strings George plucked were on his 'uke'. He does his own stunting, too, using a rope of balloons like a skinny Tarzan.
A
wartime hit in Britain, the film even
ran a year in Russia as the aftermath
of a screening for British seamen on
the Murmansk run. But Grandad's
Flannelette Nightshirt couldn't really
have been funnier with Russian
sub-titles.
ALEXANDERWALKER
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This page was last updated 02 Dec 2002