Charing Cross Road

Not many people are aware that before John Mills became the ubiquitous war hero in films of the 40s,50s and 60s that he was a song and dance man.Mind you he was not perhaps the best he was certainly never going to be any sort of a challenge to Jack Buchanan.I have to say firstly that the DVD copy i have is a 46minute Pathescope edition of the film so it is missing 26minutes.Pathescope used to issue these cut down versions in the long defunct 9.5 mm sound gauge.It is lucky that they did as most of the pre 1939 British Lion films are supposed to have been accidentally destroyed in the Second World War.The story is a bit tenuous and told in a rather irritating fashion.Partly in flashback and partly in the first person.The musical numbers are by and large photographed in a totally unimaginative way ,positioning the camera in the front stalls.Indeed it could have been an early talkie for all the imagination used.The finale is a fairly reasonable number.however this films main interest is in seeing John Mills before he appeared in uniform on screen.

A youthful John Mills shakes a leg in white tie & tails in his pre-war days as a song & dance man while Coral Browne (billed as 'Brown') looks as worldly as she did nearly forty years later in 'Theatre of Blood' as the Other Woman in a cautionary tale told in flashback to Mills and fiancée June Clyde by Arthur Sinclair to lend a bit of weight to this otherwise lightweight musical revue.

Browne towers over most of the rest of the cast in her slinky thirties gown; a fate spared Mills as their scenes take place in different time frames.

The one thing that I did notice about John Mills in this film was his speed of thought. He kind of reminded me of John Gielguld in 'Secret Agent' with a stuffy, stiff upper lip approach to his engagement with people who were different from him. This is a quintessentially 1930's British film.