Film 2014 : Crook's Tour (1941)
Feb. 5th, 2014 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gervase_fenCaldicott – "Do you suppose it would be any good if we told our story to the British Consul?"
Charters – "He’d never believe it."
Caldicott – "We could leave out all the ridiculous bits."
Charters – "There wouldn’t be much left."
Charters and Caldicott’s third screen outing, after The Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich, has an illustration of a train on the title card in the opening credits – false advertising as it turns out. (All the journeys undertaken in the tour – principally to Baghdad, Istanbul and Budapest – are travels by maps.) In this radio serial adaptation the cricket enthusiasts are caught up in a sketched-on-the-back-of –an-envelope plot involving a gramophone record, a night club singer and secret plans to sabotage an oil pipeline. La Palermo, the night club singer, is played by Greta Gynt, the hardest working performer in the movie. She gets three songs in the three cities, two veil dance routines, and is caught in the middle of the night in Caldicott’s hotel bedroom, first by Caldicott, then by Charters, and then by Caldicott’s fiancée, Edith Charters (Noel Hood, looking uncannily like Maureen Lipman.)
Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne do the best they can with what they’ve been given, but when Naunton Wayne says (after the bedroom imbroglio) “This is dreadful”, it’s difficult not to agree with him. Contrived business which might have worked on the radio (although I doubt it) involving a missing bathroom and mistaken identity doesn't. On the plus side, the songs are quite pleasant (my favourite was La Palermo's Budapest number, "Gypsy Lover"). I’ll award an extra point for the surprising nationality of the spies Charters and Caldicott are mistaken for – American. Filmed at the Rock Studios, Elstree, aka Albert Square. The film is a supplement on the Criterion Blu-Ray of “The Lady Vanishes”, and hence is one of the least likely High Definition transfers committed to disc.
Next episode : The Angry Silence
Charters – "He’d never believe it."
Caldicott – "We could leave out all the ridiculous bits."
Charters – "There wouldn’t be much left."
Charters and Caldicott’s third screen outing, after The Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich, has an illustration of a train on the title card in the opening credits – false advertising as it turns out. (All the journeys undertaken in the tour – principally to Baghdad, Istanbul and Budapest – are travels by maps.) In this radio serial adaptation the cricket enthusiasts are caught up in a sketched-on-the-back-of –an-envelope plot involving a gramophone record, a night club singer and secret plans to sabotage an oil pipeline. La Palermo, the night club singer, is played by Greta Gynt, the hardest working performer in the movie. She gets three songs in the three cities, two veil dance routines, and is caught in the middle of the night in Caldicott’s hotel bedroom, first by Caldicott, then by Charters, and then by Caldicott’s fiancée, Edith Charters (Noel Hood, looking uncannily like Maureen Lipman.)
Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne do the best they can with what they’ve been given, but when Naunton Wayne says (after the bedroom imbroglio) “This is dreadful”, it’s difficult not to agree with him. Contrived business which might have worked on the radio (although I doubt it) involving a missing bathroom and mistaken identity doesn't. On the plus side, the songs are quite pleasant (my favourite was La Palermo's Budapest number, "Gypsy Lover"). I’ll award an extra point for the surprising nationality of the spies Charters and Caldicott are mistaken for – American. Filmed at the Rock Studios, Elstree, aka Albert Square. The film is a supplement on the Criterion Blu-Ray of “The Lady Vanishes”, and hence is one of the least likely High Definition transfers committed to disc.
Next episode : The Angry Silence
