Cavalcade of Variety

A wartime revue movie that comes across a bit like a 1940s version of (insert the name of your country here)'s Got Talent but without the self-loving judges. More enjoyable than expected thanks to some quirky acts between the songs.

Made by Butchers Film Distributors to support a main feature. We are fortunate that such films survive,as similar films from the thirties,e.g.In Town Tonight,are lost.

We are given an insight into what people were watching in cinemas and music halls in 1940. Now some of it may not seem fantastic to our eyes,I am sure if they could see some of the rubbish that passes as entertainment today, they would be similarly inclined.

The show is mcd by Peter Probably the worst ventriloquist of all time. He found fame on radio with Educating Archie. I remember being taken to a stage show featuring him. Watch his lips move.

Just as film students in the emergent Soviet Union were forced by the lack of raw film stock to cannibalise old movies to practice upon, so F.W.Baker, head of production at Butcher's Films here rose to the wartime challenge twenty years later of providing 'new' product for cinemas by occasionally cutting from a few pre-War variety acts strung together to footage shot by veteran director Thomas Bentley of ventriloquist Peter Brough sharing a 'gox' at the theatre with his dummy Jimmy where this is supposedly being staged.

Billy Cotton looks almost the same age as I remember him on TV nearly thirty years later. Despite a fleeting topical reference by Brough to the invasion of Holland ("I expect they'll be freed soon") the age of the material being used is betrayed by the thirties hairstyles worn by most of the young women on stage being ogled by Jimmy.