May

So attached was director Oswald Mitchell to his 1934 version that he remade Danny Boy for Butcher’s seven years later, when its original screenplay was replaced by one from Vera Allinson, to which he and A. Barr-Carson contributed. Back then, it had starred musical comedy star Dorothy Dickson and Frank Forbes-Robertson; the remake had Ann Todd as Jane Kaye, returning from the States to Britain in search of ex-husband Nick (John Warwick) and son Danny (Grant Taylor). Mitchell’s new company had the advantage of Wilfrid Lawson and David Farrar in supporting roles, as well as Wylie Watson and music-hall veteran survivor Albert Whelan. Produced by Hugh Perceval and made at Ealing, it attracted mixed reviews. For some, it was ‘sentimental nonsense’ with Todd ‘woefully mis-cast’ and ‘The popular songs might have raised wartime morale, but things must have been at a pretty low ebb for anyone to have emerged from watching this slipshod entertainment with a spring in their step.’ In more kindly mood, the MFB thought that ‘the simple story is developed sincerely and humanly [sic] by the players’ and that ‘scenes of London in the blitz are well photographed and almost too realistic’. A trawl of highly sweetened old songs yielded mildly mournful items such as Percy French’s evocative ‘Mountains o’ Mourne’, ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song [Just A Song At Twilight]’, Frederick Weatherly’s brilliant lyric for the ‘Londonderry Air’ title song sung by Todd, ‘Abide With Me’, and ‘If Tears Could Bring You Back’. This was an emotional territory in which Butcher’s felt at home.

June

The last of George Formby’s Ealing series, Turned Out Nice Again, eschews the war altogether; rather, we have a domestic comedy based on Hugh Mills and Wells Root’s stage play As You Are, which had played at the Aldwych Theatre in January 1940 for a modest seventy-five performances.