In the 1946 film "London Town", the British music hall comedian Sid Field plays Jerry Sanford, who takes a train from the provinces into London with his young daughter Peg (played by a young Petulia Clark) after he gets his big break to appear as the star comedian in a new West End revue. Once he's there, though, he finds out that he's actually been hired to be the understudy for the show's real star comedian, Charlie de Haven (Sonnie Hale). After many months that see Jerry spending all his time sitting in the wings, Peg devises a prank to play on Charlie so that Jerry can finally get the chance to go and show everyone how good he is: she does, he does, and Jerry becomes a big success. But then Peg has second thoughts about what she's done, and decides to tell Jerry everything....
Sid Field had appeared in three hugely popular stage revues in the U.K. during the 1940s, and he was encouraged (reportedly at the behest of Stan Laurel) to do this film so that he could preserve some of the sketches that he had done onstage. We get to see two, here: one where he plays a flamboyant photographer who alternately teases and scolds the person he's photographing ("I've never seen such a baby mare!" he tells his subject, a mayor); another where he plays a man having a golf lesson where he misinterprets everything the instructor tells him to do (in a style reminiscent at times of Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First" routine, and of another famous golf routine done by Jackie Gleason and Art Carney did on "The Honeymooners").
There originally were four sketches in the film, but the only version of "London Town" currently available on video is a 93-minute U.K. reissue version---down somewhat from the film's original 123-minute running time, but doubtless an improvement over the 1953 U.S. release version, which ran 75 minutes.
When the film premiered in the U.K. in September, 1946, it became enshrined as one of the biggest flops in British film history: the producers spent £1 million on the production, which was filmed, in Technicolor, mostly on elaborate soundstage sets, in an attempt to make a British film that could compete with the American film musicals being turned out at the time. U.S. songwriters (Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke) were brought over for the film, as was a U.S. director---Wesley Ruggles, who had previously helmed "Cimarron" and "I'm No Angel"---as it was felt that no British director working at the time was up to the task of making the film. Agnes de Mille also came over, but she stayed long enough to choreograph one number (the "daffodils" ballet that precedes the song "My Heart Goes Crazy") before decamping back to the States.
It's hard to say who is responsible for staging the film's other numbers, which are gi-normous yet marked with an oddly clumsy, sometimes dumbfounding quality. One number features a small lake built on a theatre stage primarily so that the veteran performer Tessie O'Shea can be flung into at one point. At other times, the film suddenly lurches in and out of swing music. The closing setpiece features a giant piano with a dozen men seated playing the keyboard. A huge, multi-scene production number is built around "The 'Ampstead Way", a dance which calls for one to smooch one's partner (while, watching this, you feel like going "blech"). Petulia Clark, who first came to prominence singing for the troops and on the radio, does not get a single chance to sing in the film.
"London Town" went into production at the same time as Gabriel Pascal's Shaw adaptation "Caesar and Cleopatra", which took a year to shoot and cost almost three times its original production budget, something which sparked negative criticism in the press even before the film premiered. Pascal's film was saved, though, when it became a huge hit in the U.S., something "London Town" missed out on when its release overseas was delayed by several years, causing it to lose much of its cost in the meantime.
The film, now, mostly seems innocuous---one of the biggest problems is how interchangeable Greta Gynt and Kay Kendall (the latter in one of her first big film roles) look, and I had to keep looking for Kendall's distinctively fine nose to tell when her character was on the screen. Sid Field, with his big, rumpled-looking face, performs very capably and appealingly, whether doing light dramatic scenes, comedy--he works beautifully with his regular straight man Jerry Desmond in the two sketch scenes--or song and dance. Field would only make one other film, the historical comedy "Cardboard Cavalier" (1949), before abandoning film and returning to the stage prior to his death in 1950. One would have been interested to see what someone like Tony Richardson would have done with him.
Gregory Avery - Mr. Avery's family lived in Wisconsin, Virginia, Florida, and the San Francisco Bay Area before setting in Medford, Oregon in 1971. Mr. ...
