Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- 1945 (from May 1945)
- 1946
- 1947
- 1948
- 1949
- 1950
- 1951
- 1952
- 1953
- 1954
- 1955
- 1956
- 1957
- 1958
- 1959
- 1960
- 1961
- 1962
- 1963
- 1964
- 1965
- 1966
- 1967
- 1968
- 1969
- 1970
- 1972
- Notes to the Text
- Select Bibliography
- Index of Film Titles
- General Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- 1945 (from May 1945)
- 1946
- 1947
- 1948
- 1949
- 1950
- 1951
- 1952
- 1953
- 1954
- 1955
- 1956
- 1957
- 1958
- 1959
- 1960
- 1961
- 1962
- 1963
- 1964
- 1965
- 1966
- 1967
- 1968
- 1969
- 1970
- 1972
- Notes to the Text
- Select Bibliography
- Index of Film Titles
- General Index
Summary
Cuteness is avoided, and offers no concessions to the often sub-Brechtian wholeness of both dialogue and song
What a Crazy WorldThe Cool Mikado
Summer Holiday
Just for Fun
It’s All Happening
Take Me Over
A Place to Go
What a Crazy World
Live It Up
Farewell Performance
It’s All Over Town
January
In welcoming Frankie Howerd to Shepperton for the filming of The Cool Mikado, director Michael Winner told him, ‘You must remember that I’m a genius.’ We must bear this in mind when considering this by turn tasteless, unintelligible, deeply irritating, amateurish, luridly colourful, disorganised, sexist adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. In writing of Howerd’s involvement, his biographers describe Winner’s production as ‘an insult to the intelligence of any self-respecting film fan’ and ‘a movie bad enough to make the most ardent moviegoer contemplate staying at home’. We suspect that Maurice Browning, modestly fêted as the librettist of a little British musical of the fifties, Twenty Minutes South, regretted that Winner’s ramshackle screenplay was credited as being ‘based on an adaptation by Maurice Browning’ of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most celebrated opera, with further intervention by Lew Schwartz and Phyllis and Robert White. Mr Browning was surely not responsible for such exchanges as that between Judge Mikado and a female witness:
Witness: My husband Mr Smith, well, he’s a beast. He insulted me and he treated me cruelly and, well, he just didn’t care where he hit me.
Mikado: And where did he hit you?
Witness: He hit me once in a grocery store and once on the corner of Elm Street.
Mikado: Oh, you poor thing. A bruise on the corner of Elm Street can be pretty painful. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me, my dear? Your phone number, for instance.
We may yet be fascinated by so gory a spectacle involving some notable names, the most prominent being Howerd as Ko-Ko, Tommy Cooper as Pooh-Bah, and Stubby Kaye as Judge Mikado. These at least retain some dignity, with the patently non-singing Howerd steering his own comic path through the mire. The patience of saints is required for the all-too-frequent manifestations of Mike and Bernie Winters (their billing matter on the halls had once been ‘Just Nuts’) and the choreography and dancing of Lionel Blair and his all-female troupe, whose work is never helped by his joining in.
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- Melody in the DarkBritish Musical Films, 1946-1972, pp. 228 - 243Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2023