Alf's Button Afloat

"Adapted from W. A. Darlington's famous farce", the credits proudly declare. But Darlington's original (first filmed as early as 1920 and here updated to 1937) is simply the springboard for a zany vehicle for The Crazy Gang.

Energetically directed by Marcel Varnel with agile photography by Arthur Crabtree (later put to work by Gainsborough on their wartime bodice-rippers) it abounds in surreal sights ranging from Alistair Sim as a genie to Bud Flanagan and Jimmy Nervo dragged up and dubbed as a pair of operatic divas; while the ingenues suffer a bizarre and wholly unexpected fate.

The aggressive craziness extends to the constant 'comical' sound effects; while the frequent use of the theme from 'Colonel Bogey' would have had entirely different connotations for wartime audiences when it was reissued five years later.

6 mates, all after a buck, end up getting themselves recruited without realising it! They all get their uniforms, and one has a dirty button. No one wants the one with the dirty button, of course, so it gets thrown about until finally Alf is stuck with it. But the button isn't dirty - see at the beginning of the movie we see Aladdin burying his lamp as he is done with it, and then in "present day" (1937) it being dug up and found, and ending up being melted down for metal in a button factory (cue funny inserts of the genie going "hmm, warm in here!") - and the mysterious "dirty" button on Alf's jacket is none other than the melted down lamp, and when he tries to clean it, the genie appears, saying he will grant his every wish. "Strike me pink!" is Alf's exclamation, and the genie does just that. Oh, if only it were in colour! The genie provides a lot of fun for the 6, often getting their instructions hilariously wrong. A groaner, but a must-see.

Although I did not see the Gang on stage,I did see them on stage I did see Bud and Ches separately.I found them very funny and my opinion has not changed over the years.The antics get more outrageous as the film progresses.This includes Bud being struck all Sheffield United and the romantic leads being chased up a tree in the middle of Kent.A very good number,Free,early on.The Gang are inimitable and irreplaceable.

This is the fourth film I have seen by the so-called 'Crazy Gang'--a group of rowdy and low-brow entertainers much like you might have found in American vaudeville or burlesque. And when I call them low-brow, this isn't meant as a pejorative term--they really were attempting to connect to the lowest sort of entertainment much like the Three Stooges. The jokes are NOT the intellectual sort and their antics are a good bit less sophisticated than Martin & Lewis or Abbott & Costello.

Of the four Crazy Gang films I've watched, "Alf's Button Afloat" is my least favorite. Perhaps it's because their humor is something that wears thin after a few films but I also think the jokes just weren't as funny here as they were in "Gasbags" or "The Frozen Limits", though I really did enjoy Alistair Sim's guest appearance in this one.

The film begins with a genie going to sleep in his magic lamp. The lamp has been buried and eventually is discovered...and makes its way to the scrap drive. Then, it's melted down and eventually the essence of this genie (Sim) is made into a common button for the British Navy. When the Gang are all stupid enough to accidentally join the Royal Navy, Alf's coat contains this genie. And, when he tries to polish the button, out pops his genie. The problem is that Alf and his friends are simply too stupid and unimaginative to figure out how to use the genie and the film ends with them wishing they'd never found it in the first place.

The jokes are mostly verbal and come one after another after another. If your idea of funny is a character who lisps heavily or corny word-play then are you in for a treat. Otherwise, I must admit that after a while it became pretty tedious--though there were some funny moments here and there. My feeling is that folks who grew up with the Crazy Gang will be MUCH more forgiving of their humor and younger folks will wonder what, exactly, folks saw in them.

Throughout the 40's and a bit either side, every movie by Gainsborough Pictures would open on an oval frame showing the lovely Glennis Lorimer greeting us in Regency costume, to brand the studio with an air of elegance, however pertinent or otherwise to the upcoming film. In the present case, the upcoming film gives us Glennis as leading lady too, which alone makes it worth watching. Not much else does.

Loosely adapted into knockabout farce from a novel by F. Anstey, it features the popular music-hall act, the Crazy Gang, as a group of street-singers who manage to get sandwiched between two squads of Royal Marines marching back to barracks, and unwittingly press-ganged into their ranks. The story swings on one of them polishing-up a brass button that has been recycled from Aladdin's lamp, calling up the long-dormant genie, offering his services in the usual slavish manner.

Up to about the midpoint, this works reasonably well, but in the second half, it provides too much licence to depart from a coherent plot, and we find ourselves disoriented in the long hunting-party scene at a country mansion, simply too far removed from the shipboard frolics we were getting into.

The Crazy Gang are given an opportunity for a joke opera performance that is enjoyable enough, with an enthusiastic Bud Flanagan in drag, but the young Alistair Sim is not well-suited to his role as the genie, and the various wishes that he grants to the gang-members just invite one film cliché after another. As with too many other film and stage comedies of 1938, the humour has not dated well at all, however much critical favour it may have gained at the time. I hadn't realised that the Colonel Bogie march was famous as early as this, since it became so identified with World War II, especially Burma - with or without its unofficial lyrics.