Happy Go Lovely

The Tales of Hoffmann

Lady Godiva Rides Again

London Entertains

March

The often-vaunted special relationship between Britain and the USA might have guaranteed a friendlier critical response to Associated British Picture Corporation’s Happy Go Lovely, produced by Marcel Hellman and directed at Elstree by Bruce Humberstone, who stood by his assertion that ‘there is no reason why typical American musicals cannot be made in England’; indeed, he was proud of ‘a musical in colour to challenge Hollywood’. Kinematograph Weekly played along, proclaiming it a ‘platinum-plated light entertainment, with a fascinating tartan finish [that] clearly outpoints the Yanks at their own particular game. No praise can be too high.’ This, of course, is nonsense, but also begs the question: why would a British studio want to make a musical that looked like an American musical? This seems to have been a long-ignored problem. Mr Humberstone explained that ‘my intention was to have a maximum of four musical numbers designed for simplicity with a Continental flavour. I believe large choruses have been overdone and, generally speaking, I think that the public is tired of them.’

The screenplay by Val Guest and experienced writer of intimate revue material Arthur Macrae, based on the ‘film story’ of F. Dammann and Dr H. Rosenfeld, could hardly have been less original, or indeed less appropriate for a film that would be coinciding with the Festival of Britain. For the MFB, ‘the story dwindles to a tedious backstage affair, eked out with corny lines and corny jokes’. Even the Hollywood-type set piece ‘Piccadilly Fantasy’ (a sort of British equivalent of Hollywood’s ‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue’) was ‘enclosed within the conventional framework and pseudo-American, synthetic in style, lacking a spontaneous flavour’. As David Shipman recognised, the dancing star imported to head up this enterprise ‘took a risk and did a British musical […] dancing round a painted Piccadilly with young men in bowler hats (it was all on that level)’.

Nevertheless, Humberstone and his colleagues clearly hoped to turn a corner while being chronically hampered by the tiredest of plots about theatrical misunderstandings, a heroine longing for stardom, and a very so-so score from Mischa Spoliansky, with sparse musical numbers arranged by Angela Morley.