As Long As They’re Happy

You Lucky People!

Value for Money

Man of the Moment

Oh … Rosalinda!!

King’s Rhapsody

Gentlemen Marry Brunettes

An Alligator Named Daisy

All for Mary

March

The mid-1950s selection of musical films painted several reasonably dismal pictures, of ambition overreached and misdirected (Oh … Rosalinda!!), a third attempt to make an Ivor Novello stage hit work on the screen with a famous Hollywood refugee and two leading ladies who couldn’t sing, a Norman Wisdom vehicle whose individuality was subsumed into the industrial regularity of his comedies, a pedestrian comedy taken from a West End play and saved only by its cherished star, and three comedies with vague pretensions to the zany, the first to appear being Rank’s As Long As They’re Happy, ‘a patchy but sometimes funny star vehicle’ according to Halliwell, ‘a feeble farce’ according to Shipman.

Kinematograph Weekly, ever ready to cheer, found its tunes ‘haunting and certain to join the hit parade’, a hope doomed to disappointment. The MFB thought Alan Melville’s tepid screenplay, adapted from Vernon Sylvaine’s songless play, ‘a script deficient in humour’ through ‘a sprawling series of “big” scenes, few of which come off. The basic joke […] has lost much of its edge, and is scarcely in itself sufficient to carry a film of this length.’ For Variety, the story was ‘told with full force in scenes which are reminiscent of the bobbysox demonstrations witnessed here in the past few years’, although it is unlikely that it made much impression on American audiences with its parade of British character actors and artists plucked from stage revues: Dora Bryan, Joan Sims, Ronnie Stevens, and Vivienne Martin, and ‘guest stars’ Diana Dors, the professionally grumpy Gilbert Harding (a blatant sop to the British television audience), and, in the last frame, the arrival of no less than Rank’s very own Norman Wisdom plugging his ‘Don’t Laugh at Me ’Cos I’m a Fool’.

Filming began swiftly; the stage production of Melville’s play had closed in May 1954. If it served any purpose, the film could be identified as a harbinger of the changing trends in British musical films, while keeping its mild but unmistakable middle-classness on the ground.