Elstree Calling

I've always wanted to see proper vaudeville live. The ever-changing tones, acts, talents, & forms seem like a lively style of theater. Onscreen, however, it's just a mess. I think we're taught to expect a through-line in film, & there simply isn't one. Not to mention several of the segments are hindered by mawkish emotion, unoriginal musical numbers, or straight racism. Still, there are good pieces (fat musician, "wrong apartment", recurring Shakespeare joke).

In producing this brand-new singing, dancing, all-talkie film, British International Pictures inadvertently contrived to preserve a cross-section of the contemporary London stage scene from the West End to the music halls. Sit back in your seat, enjoy the entertainment beamed directly to your home (I had no idea that television existed in the popular perception long before the BBC), and let yourself be carried away back to the days of 1930, flitting from venue to venue to experience a night out in the London of the era. Some of the acts are to one taste, some to another, but you've paid for the programme as a whole so applaud and wait to see what's coming next.

My personal favourite would be the live-wire tapping and jazzy tunes of the Three Eddies' blackface act (especially the skeleton dance!), but while overall I was interested in this revue chiefly for the music -- it features unknown (at least to me) tunes by Vivian Ellis and Ivor Novello, for example -- there's a good deal else that's worth enjoying, and a few tantalising glimpses 'backstage' at the Elstree studios as well.

"Elstree Calling" was edited on the cheap and rushed out in ten days for a hasty release to recoup the cost of production, and it shows. Few of the five or six camera angles filmed on every shot actually got used, for instance, and a number of bizarre choices seem to have been made, such as choosing to show a dance sequence via a camera focused too high and showing a vast expanse of curtain above the performers' heads but cutting off their actual feet -- or a shot that shows the performers disappearing off the left-hand side of the frame while focusing on the empty set centre-stage. Did anybody even take the trouble to screen these clips before attaching them together? (Director Adrian Brunel, who had left detailed directions for the compilation of his footage only for them to be totally ignored, complained in his autobiography "How could the Hulbert-Courtneidge numbers be slung together like that without looking like casual newsreel photographing?")

I was also a bit puzzled by the smoke that appears to be pouring out of the top of the jaw-droppingly gigantic image of 'Little' Teddy Brown in the background of his first musical interlude -- presumably a side-effect of the stage lighting? But it isn't just the editing: certainly in the chorus sequences, the choreography tends to suffer from being cramped onto a film set, while no-one seems to yet have worked out how to avoid having a long line of girls strung out across the middle of a square-format screen. (See, e.g. the chorus sequences in British-Gaumont's "First a Girl" for more sophisticated treatment later in the Thirties.)

Still, I found this glimpse onto the theatre world of the era thoroughly enjoyable: it was particularly interesting after having screened the shorts in the silent "On With the Dance" series of only a few years only, since the styles are very similar but obviously this time with music. Just don't expect cinema: theatre is what is advertised, and theatre is what you will get -- though there is a brief homage to the antics of Douglas Fairbanks in the burlesque "Taming of the Shrew" that closes the act!

Elstree Calling (1930), like most of the revues of the era, has some high points and misfires. Hitchcock's linking material here can be quite funny, and the colour sequences aren't bad (even if "The Thought Never Entered My Head" is a bit ungainly). A pleasant goof, for most

Ellstree Calling is a delightful revue film for those who can appreciate eras other than their own. Some of the highlights are: The Three Eddies, a top African American tap dance team that made a big success in the U.K.; they dance two numbers in this revue. Two numbers also by Lily Morris are great giggle ("Why Am I Always the Bridesmaid" is gem of character comedy.) Cicely Courtneidge closes the movie in a production number in color, doing an amusing song & eccentric dance. And Donald Calthrop interrupts the proceedings a number of times as an actor willing to do anything to get his moment in the spotlight. A couple of color production numbers are campy at best, but the film's strength is the individual 'turns' by its variety stars. Ellstree Calling was one of the most successful early talkies anywhere in the world: it was translated into 11 languages and made a fortune through the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other British outposts around the globe. -- Frank Cullen American Vaudeville Museum and Vaudeville Times quarterly

I've probably seen this one over a dozen times now and I still love it, but mainly from the standpoint of the music. You have to forget you are a film buff (you are, aren't you?) and think of it as a collection of pop videos from 1930. And the pop ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous: My Heart Is Saying, in colour (?) nicely sung by Helen Burnell but danced atrociously, to Only A Working Man in b&w by the incomparable Lily Morris. Praise the Lord this film was made if only for her two turns, also the Will Fyffe bits and the Cicely Courtneidge end song, I'm Falling In Love. How that one passed the censor at the time I'll never know ... I suppose no one told him!

Helen Burnell must have been the dancing inspiration for Jessie Matthews, or did all Show People dance like hippos pretending to be trees in the 20's? I've always loved the work of Jack Hulbert, mainly for his innocent British enthusiasm (and songs), but I'm afraid that he looked like a manic bus conductor in his one dance scene. Rotund Teddy Brown was marvellous to listen to - until he started telling jokes; The 3 Eddies - ah! Can you just imagine them walking on stage and launching into their high powered act nowadays? Horrified silence would follow, but how times and tastes have changed. The song Ladies Maids Always In The Know sung and danced to by the Charlot Girls would likewise be incomprehensible to nearly everyone too.

The glue that 'holds' all this and more together is supplied by Gordon Harker trying to get a picture of it all on his TV and Tommy Handley as TV linkman, with some surprisingly flat gags for a change. A running gag is supplied by Donald Calthrop attempting to perform Shakespeare; Anna May Wong puts him in his place - have you ever seen 'Taming of the shrew' with a massive custard pie fight or with a circling riderless motorcycle being whipped?

If you're going to watch this for the Hitchcock bits and are unmusical you won't like it, but if you can open your ears and hearts to these fine personalities from a bygone age then like me you may get something like innocent merriment from Elstree Calling.