January

It is unlikely that Oswald Mitchell is much mentioned in scholarly discussions of British film directors, but we owe him a debt. Mitchell’s interest in the slightly tatty world of music hall and variety is a cornerstone of his work. It could not be more obvious than in his third picture, Butcher’s Film Services’ Stars on Parade, following on from his 1934 Danny Boy and the 1935 Cock o’ the North. What makes Stars on Parade so appealing is that Mitchell and his co-director and editor Challis Sanderson make no attempt at a credible threading story. The turns that turned up to be filmed at Cricklewood are a fascinating collection that includes performers whose reputations have endured, and lesser immortals for whom Mitchell’s little film provides a resting place. Some, indeed, qualify as ‘wines and spirits’, the theatrical term reserved for those performers whose names (like the details of available alcoholic beverages) were printed in the smallest type at the bottom of a variety bill.

Among the less remembered are ‘Radio’s Schoolgirl Sweetheart Pat Hyde’, accompanying herself on the accordion in ‘Only A Shanty In Old Shanty Town’; laid-back brothers Syd and Max Harrison with their acrobatic dancing; and the soprano street singer Pat O’Brien singing the Irish favourite ‘Old Fashioned Mother Of Mine’. ‘Go on, Pat O’Brien’, urges music-hall veteran Albert Whelan (he of the signature music for ‘The Three Bears’) to ‘make us cry’, and – decades later – he still may.