As far as Tommy Handley goes, star of this film, I must be missing something as the reviews generally were glowing, yet I find him seriously unfunny. Very corny jokes and these...........well what do you call them - "Well I'll sew buttons on me old mum's rice pudding" - 'funny' sayings when he's surprised at something that has happened? They leave me dead.
This film seemed to be a co-production as it had a pretty American actress/singer (her last film in a short career, despite living to 92 - I presume she made her name on the stage) and the slickness of an American production, but almost everyone else was British - Felix Aylmer for one, with Pete Murray (yes, the DJ!) with American accent and one line and gone in one minute, and WTF was Stéphane Grappelli (the superb jazz violinist) doing as part of a Elizabethan madrigal outfit?!
There was the joy though with an all too brief appearance of Will Hay's old sidekicks Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt. I see on the IMDb that Will Hay's last film was in 1943 so perhaps that's part of the reason they started to do other films, and sadly it seems none of that great trio lived to any age, with Moffat dying at only 45.
Aylmer, the professor, has made a time-machine and takes them all back, for some reason, to Elizabethan times (perhaps they'd just done a film set in that period and it saved the extras taking the costumes off) and a jolly time was had by all, except me - this timeI've promised myself never to watch a Tommy Handley film again.
I did notice that Handley was wearing an identical fur coat, oft favoured by that other "comedian" Bud Flanagan, so am wondering if that is the reason neither of them are funny.
