January

Gaumont-British’s film of ‘The Radio Sensation with Twenty Million Listeners’, It’s That Man Again, is testament to its star Tommy Handley. Denis Gifford claims the wireless version was ‘the most famous and popular radio comedy series ever’. Although Ted Kavanagh and Howard Irving Young’s screenplay necessarily involves Handley’s Mayor of Foaming at the Mouth in a plot, it fails to altogether submerge the star’s effectiveness in dealing with ‘crazy, inconsequential material’. In a film produced by Edward Black and filmed at Shepherd’s Bush, director Walter Forde manages the incorporation of several of the radio series’ characters and catchphrases: Dorothy Summers as ever-obliging Mrs Mopp (‘Can I do you now, sir?’), the excessive politeness of Claude and Cecil, and the Lord Haw-Haw-like broadcasting of Funf (impressionist Jack Train). The Mayor takes over the bombed-out Olympian Theatre, along with its drama school. Efforts to make a success of it are interrupted by the programme’s characters, allowing Mrs Mopp to do a cod ballet and the mildest of striptease. The songs of Hans May and his lyricist Alan Stranks are not distinguished. They include ‘Oh Mr Crosby’ sung by a female trio that includes Jean Kent, Greta Gynt’s’ ‘Don Valentino’, Handley’s ‘Tenderfoot Song’, ‘Just For Tonight’ for a dubbed Kent, ‘No, Not Now’ and ‘Dear Old Glory’. The comedy depends heavily on Handley’s quick-fire technique and apparently spontaneous verbal by-play, culminating in his direct farewell to camera, ‘Ta-ta for now’.

March

The MFB had no complaint of Butcher’s Variety Jubilee, reporting that ‘Direction and production as a whole are as simple as this story, content to present the variety turns which are the main reason for this film.’ The film knows its place. Fair enough, but Variety Jubilee is rather more; despite its obvious naivety, it has the air of a spectacle demandé, skilfully concocted by the prolific sentimentalist Kathleen Butler providing story and screenplay, with Mabel Constanduros chipping in with dialogue.