Oh, Daddy!

An antique period piece, but with quite a bit of nostalgic charm for anyone who remembers the PG Wodehouse/Ben Travers era of English comedy writing. However creaky the film, it is good to see contemporary comedians such as Leslie Henson and Robertson Hare at their peak. And I never before realised that Frances Day really did have considerable screen presence.

Just when you thought you'd seen all the good 1930s musicals you discover this fabulous fun film. Whilst it's not quite FOOTLIGHT DAMES OF 1933 level, it's got that similar feel and a million times better than the lame WB musicals of the late 30s.

Like DAMES, the plot concerns a group of killjoys called The Purity League who are taught the error of their ways when they encounter a sassy sexy showgirl. Over in America the real Catholic Legion of Decency had just imposed the puritanical censorship of the Hays Code on all of Hollywood's output so it was left to England to keep the flag of saucy fun flying. Yes, we could still make silly and irreverent films with very scantily clad chorus girls as this demonstrates.

This is an absolute joy. The story is engaging and still genuinely funny all these years later. The script is witty and the acting is natural with likeable characters you feel you can get to know. The cast are perfect: Robertson Hare is hilarious, music hall star Leslie Henson is fantastic - what a shame he made so few pictures and Frances Day is stunningly sexy with a refreshingly real personality. Coupled with dynamic direction and exceptionally high production values, this is an absolute must for fans of those original Warner musicals.

Why the production is such high quality is because of 'sibling rivalry.' In 1935, Michael Balcon ran both Gaumont-British and Gainsborough. At Gaumont, Victor Saville (who actually founded Gainsborough with Balcon and Graham Cutts a decade earlier) made the classy, big budget musicals such as those with the world's most beautiful actress (Jessie Matthews) whereas Graham Cutts at Gainsborough made the B movies. Cutts wanted to show Balcon that he too could make pictures just as classy as those his former colleague made down the road at Gaumont and really succeeded with this....even without the divinity that was Miss Matthews!

"Oh, Daddy" is one of the many "B" movies cranked out in England during the 1930s. It's an example of what came to be known as "quota quickies," to satisfy requirements of the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927. All aspects of this production are second-rate. The screenplay, direction, camera work and editing are not good. And the cast is all lesser known actors. The only ones known much beyond the 1930s are a couple of the supporting cast - Marie Lohr and Robertson Hare.

None of the leads had the talent to make it big or last in movies -- even as supporting actors. Leslie Henson, who plays Lord Wilfred Pye, couldn't shed his silent film exaggerations, and he quickly becomes irksome in this film. He didn't have the looks, voice or skill to dance. This was his last lead role and the last film he was in for nearly 20 years.

Frances Day, as Benita de Lys, had the looks and was passable as an actress. But her singing voice wasn't very good on film. Day wasn't even British. She was born in New Jersey, nee Frances Schenk. At age 16, she was in a stage chorus line. When she was 19, she traveled to England where she married a promoter and began a nightclub career as a cabaret dancer and singer. After "Oh, Daddy," Day made only half a dozen more films in the 1930s, mostly forgotten, before returning to her nightclub career. In the next two decades she was in just five more films and one TV show.

The story of this film is a lampooning of the Purity League. There was no such known identifiable entity in England, but the screenplay seems to take aim at a combination of the temperance league and various other social morality groups that were common in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, Great Britain did not go so far as to establish prohibition, after seeing the American experience that led to widespread organized crime.

This film gives an impression of being a high-class production with a montage of nightclub scenes and snippets of traveling trains. But those and the costumes of the rich clothing of the period can't disguise that it is a cheap production. While Gainsborough made mostly B films, this is not one of its better ones. I left and returned four times to watch this film through to its end.

While the quality of British comedies in the 1930s couldn't compete with those of Hollywood, there were many fine English films made during the decade, including some comedies. The next decade would be a banner period of British comedy. For some very good British comedies of the 1930s, see any of the Jesse Matthews films with prominent performers of the period. Some of my favorites are "The Good Companions" of 1933, "Evergreen" of 1934, "It's Love Again" of 1936, and "Climbing High" of 1938. Other prominent actors and entertainers made good comedies during the decade as well. Robert Donat starred in "The Ghost Goes West" of 1935, with a fine supporting cast that includes Jean Parker, Eugene Pallette and Elsa Lanchester.

Oh, yes - another word on that Cinematograph Films Act of 1927. While British films from the start kept pace with American movie-making, by the mid-1920s, the English audiences for British-made films had declined from 25 percent to just five percent. Parliament passed the 1927 act to require that movie theaters show so many British-made films as well as any other. The law worked, and the audiences for British films soon increased. But there was a down-side to the new law as well. It led to many inferior films of poor quality just to meet the quotas. These films became known as "quota quickies."

A "quota quickie" or not, "Oh, Daddy" is a poor film with little humor and talent. I found just one line of dialog in the entire film worth a chuckle. Lord Pye says to Benita de Lys, "How dare you not tell me you were not what you were when all the time you really were."

A rare chance to see the almost forgotten Leslie Henson and why he was such a popular star of his day. He is funny throughout this typically frothy comedy of the time which also spotlights the kind of entertainment to be seen in contemporary West End nightclubs. Robertson Hare and the supremely bombastic Alfred Drayton are on good form too, though the latter has little to do, while Frances Day is effervescent and fun. In actuality England didn't go in much for the likes of Purity Leagues, which reflects the story's origins from a German play.

This film might be seen by today's film buffs as an early showcase for the work of directors Michael Powell (who storylined it) and Charles Frend (who edited it), but it really should be taken at face value. It's a bit of fun, having a laugh at the expense of the moral minority who even in 1935 were starting to annoy the cinematic industry. There's grand performances from Leslie Henson and Robertson Hare, who went on to play the Chauffer in The Young Ones. It's worth watching just to see how films were made in 1935 and to see how much influence the night club scene had on television's Jeeves & Wooster, where Charles Frend's montage of champagne filled glasses, bright city lights and drunken toffs show how much can be achieved with a minimal budget.