The Lady Is a Square

Make Mine a Million

Idol on Parade

Serious Charge

The Heart of a Man

Sweet Beat

Tommy the Toreador

Desert Mice

Follow a Star

Expresso Bongo

February

Writing of the new Anna Neagle film, The Times considered that ‘The productions of Mr Herbert Wilcox are generally designed with considerable shrewdness to make the best of a variety of different worlds. Here [he] metaphorically speaking, marries Miss Anna Neagle to Mr Frankie Vaughan, thus ensuring the approval of the middle-brows […] and of the shriekers and swooners.’ Philosophical matters had never really come within the compass of Herbert Wilcox’s films; the lack of them probably encouraged their often enormous success at the box office, but there might be a suspicion of imponderable quandaries lurking within his productions, each to be dealt with as superficially as possible. His ‘serious’ films made with Neagle, with her impersonations of Nell Gwyn, Florence Nightingale, Amy Johnson, Queen Victoria (twice; having made one film about her, Wilcox enjoyed it so much that he made another), Edith Cavell, and Odette, suggested that the frothiness of their other work had been put aside for the duration. Throughout a long and distinguished career, Neagle’s professionalism and sheer hard work were unquestionable, and the British cinemagoer had kept her prominently at the coal face for thirty years.

As the 1950s drew to a close, the Wilcoxes needed to place themselves advantageously at the beginning of a new decade, fifteen years after the end of a war that had in no way damaged their progress. Looking over their shoulders, they must have realised the difficulties that awaited them. David Shipman has succinctly described the final phase of Neagle’s work in pictures after Lilacs in the Spring and King’s Rhapsody. Wilcox

then put her into an ‘up-to-date’ story, My Teenage Daughter, cruelly referred to as ‘My Stone-Age Mother’, and – in another attempt to re-interest the public – loaned her to ABPC to play a hospital matron in No Time for Tears. But it was: The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk played just a week in a small West End cinema and didn’t make the circuits; and many cinemas showing her last film The Lady is a Square, omitted her name.