Maytime in Mayfair

SPRING IN PARK LANE had been such a success that producer-director Herbert Wilcox and star/wife Anna Neagle reassembled the cast and crew for this similarly named effort. It begins much like IRENE -- Wilcox and Neagle had made the 1940 screen version. Michael Wilding has inherited a dress business and is ready to sell it, until he meets manager/designer Anna, falls in love instantly and decides to help run the business while he pursues her.

There's a lot more comedy in this movie than the previous year's smash success. Wilding mugs outrageously and competitor Peter Graves tries to sing on a couple of occasions. Two dance numbers show up and the whole movie is shot in Best British Technicolor, which is also used to offer a brief fantasy fashion show It also contains Tom Walls next to last screen performance, as an Irish bobby. In the 1930s he starred in several of the Aldwych farces, transferred from stage to screen. In the 1940s, he moved into major supporting roles. He died a few months after this was released.

Of the six films that Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding made as a team this is the only one in color. Good thing too because for some of the dream sequences and/or musical numbers it was surely necessary.

Maytime In Mayfair finds Wilding a charming but broke aristocrat (apparently Wilding specialized in those roles) who finds he's an inherited a posh dress shop which caters to the aristocracy of which he's one of the poorer members till recently. First instinct is to sell the place, but after meeting Anna Neagle the store manager who runs the places and does some of the designs. Soon enough Wilding has designs on her and that plays into him trying to make a go of the business.

Some nice sequences every bit as good as what was done on this side of the pond with the music, dance, and fashion sequences. Neagle and Wilding have more British charm than you'll see this side of David Niven.

Wilding's rival for the business and Neagle's affections is Peter Graves who is a real snake in the grass, not above a little espionage to steal Neagle's designs. In that he's aided and abetted by Wilding's friend Nicholas Phipps who gets riotously drunk and spills the beans without knowing it.

If you like your British cinema escapist and entertaining than Maytime In Mayfair is for you.

I first saw this film over 25 years ago on British TV and have only just caught up with it again last week on a DVD copy bought off ebay. I had remembered the musical sequences, the colour and the gorgeous fashion plate poses and clothes but the plot is weaker than the earlier Anna Neagle/Michael Wilding film Spring in Park Lane and Maytime doesn't stand up so well to the passage of the years. But Michael Wilding is a joy in the film, charming, funny, debonair, appears to be having great fun and on top of his form. Worth watching for him alone. Anna Neagle appears a little matronly beside him, and a little too old for the part she plays but by the end of the 1940's their film partnership was well established with the cinema going public. Spring in Park Lane had been a top hit for 1947 and a big money maker. In his autobiography Wilding wrote at length of his great regard for Herbert Wilcox the director and instigator of this London series of films.

No doubt Michael Wilding had his fans at the time (and even now) but for me he is trading on a charm doesn't in fact possess in this story. To be fair I am saying story rather than performance because the silliness really is at the story and script level, and Wilding is delivering what is required by both. By virtue of an unexpected inheritance he breaks in on the Neagle character's successful fashion business and he and his buddy set about spoiling it in small ways and then a large way. His behaviour is insensitive and irritating but clearly is intended to be accepted as whimsical and charming, and eventually irresistible to Neagle. A real person with self-respect would have socked him and walked off the job well before she does in this film. I was born the year after this film was made, and so I have had a good chance to observe how much attitudes to women have changed - or not changed as much as they should. I can see presented uncritically in this film some of the fundamental disrespect of women which is still so toxic to our culture today. In between repeatedly muttering "that ain't funny" I did enjoy some of the aspects of this film (eg the costumes). Neagle does a respectable job of her dancing although I take it the dancing in the major dance sequences is done by a lookalike double. In closeups she is heavily painted and clearly is no spring chicken. Yet her character is described as a "girl". She is a lovely, dignified and ladylike woman, and very credible as a successful businessperson, which many might think is better than being a girl.

Anna Neagle may have been a bit old for this sort of thing by 1949, but it is certainly a fun movie, as her fashion house is inherited by the rather silly Mr Gore-Brown (Wilding) and in competition with the even sillier D'Arcy Davenport. The colours are vivid, the situations progressively dafter, and the film quietly grows on you. They certainly don't make 'em like this now!