User Reviews

Arthur Askey stars in "Miss London Limited" and when I noticed this, my expectations for the film were rather low. Despite having seen quite a few of his film over the last several years, I never really appreciated his style of films. And, as it turns out, "Miss London Limited" was not about to change my mind.

The film begins with Askey running a dating service during WWII. He has just acquired a new partner and the two of them try to breathe new life into the agency. However, the company is on the verge of bankruptcy and it looks like unless they come up with something fast, they'll be thrown out on the streets.

Despite having a plot that could have worked, the film suffers from several HUGE problems. First, it isn't funny—which is a SERIOUS problem for a comedy. A few gags work (such as Askey's character commenting on how he hates that actor, Arthur Askey as well as the inside joke about the film "Charley's Aunt"—in which Askey starred) but most don't. In particular, the guy who does impersonations was pretty lame and most of them sounded just awful. Second, like most comedies of the era, the producers insisted on adding songs. And, unfortunately, they were pretty bad and didn't help the film in the least. Third, I just didn't care in the least about any of the characters. The bottom line is that the film is watchable, but that it about all.

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.

There's a delightful slam at Jack Benny in "Charley's Aunt" in this "vedy British musical" with sensibilities for all English speaking audiences with some knowledge of the culture of entertainment in the war era. At one point, comic Arthur Askey has Robert Woolsey glasses and a Groucho mustache, and later on, Evelyn Dall takes on the Groucho look and persona while Arthur Askey does Harpo and Jack Train emulates Chico. Imitations of W.C. Fields follow in between the many upbeat musicals (absolutely no ballads!) where it is quite noticeable how much they seem to sound alike.

There's also a very funny rib at British movie musical star Jessie Matthews that those of us Yanks lucky enough to know will find delightful. In spite of the similarity in songs, it's a delightful score by Val Guest who refuses to give his audience a chance to sleep as these numbers pop up seemingly within minutes of each other. If this was the state of British musical comedy in the West End of the war era, then find a time capsule and send me back!

The basic premise has Dall arriving in England from America to take over her father's business (managed by Askey) and finding romance with the chipper Peter Graves, who is no relation to the star of "Mission: Impossible", comic pilot of "Airplane!" and narrator of the biography TV series. There's plenty of physical comedy involving Askey who has a clumsy elegance about him, making him the ballet dancer of klutzes. I would have to put this in the top ten of musicals made in 1943 (there were probably about a hundred!), and one that classic movie fans should seek out for its references to American stars as well as an introduction to the type of sass the British could get down with whe they had a star as talented as Askey leading the way.