Review of Miss London Ltd.

The main interest in this was its portrayal of London life in the fourth year of the war. An American woman (Evelyn Dall, the dead spit of Barbara Windsor) inherits half the partnership in Miss London Ltd, an escort agency; Big Hearted Arthur Askey is the other partner. (there are obvious parallels with Peter Sellers and Constance Cummings in The Battle of the Sexes, 1959). Dall arrives off the boat train at Waterloo Station, via the Azores and Lisbon, during the opening song by Anne Shelton, the station announcer, who later in the film shows more cleavage that would otherwise have been acceptable at the time, except for the exigencies of the war. This song is sung from the "control room", and I was reminded of Schlesinger's Terminus (1961 - a day in the life of Waterloo). The words are set round the stations served from Waterloo, many of them now long-defunct, such as Chard and those on the Meon Valley Line). The studio set of the Waterloo concourse, complete with the old cameo cinema, was remarkably accurate. Further scenes on the platforms were either filmed sur place or were of exceptionally high quality for a studio (not least in the Southern Railway carriage detail). The song and dance routine (with the girl SR Porters in uniforms looking surprisingly like those introduced with the sixties design changes) moved off the platform to the concourse and past the original platform indicator board by the low numbered platforms. (A version of this type of mechanical indicator is in the National Railway Museum in York). The board shows more old stations, but the panels at the top cleverly flash out the last line of the song. Actually, there was a big goof in all this: the boat train is shown at platform one, but in reality they all came and went from around platforms 11 to 13. Dall leaves the station by the Victory Arch and hails a taxi (though in fact one picked up taxis from the carriage road under the canopy. At this point she meets Peter Graves' army captain. I thought he sounded like David Niven, and later someone actually says he sounds like Niven! The rest of the film trundles along merrily. When Dall gets to the escort agency the pictures of the girls are all 19th century pinups. More modern girls are acquired, who are all out to earn extra money (etc) on top of their war-work day jobs. However one girl says she was sacked from being an aircraft observer as the aircraft came in too low to observe her. (It was actually very interesting how the film cleverly skirted round the seamier side of escort agencies, making the whole this appear quite wholesome, apart from one reference to the girls being on duty till midnight, after when, what they did was their own affair!) In another scene a posh dinner à deux is arranged in the captain's hotel room. The waiter lists the menu, essentially a dozen variants on Woolton Pie! It was very difficult to catch all the wartime references, but one I did was, "He's as difficult to understand as those messages after the 9 o'clock news": these were the coded messages sent from London to the Resistance. Two of the best bits in the film were the brilliant take-off of the Marx Brothers, and Richard Hearne (later Mr Pastry on children's TV in the forties and fifties) as the dancing commodore.