Romance de gloria

Brenda Joyce thinks she has a part in a new West End show, and stardom. The producer decides to put on a revue featuring talent from war industries instead. Miss Joyce takes a job in an airplane factory to get in on that.

It's a surprisingly inept movie directed by the usually reliable Joseph Santley. I lay most of the blame on a script in which people rarely speak, but give speeches; when they do speak, it sounds like they've learned English dialogue by reading penny dreadfuls. Douglas Heath, playing the RAF Officer at the plant -- he's the love interest, as anyone can tell in the first minute of the movie, when he insults Miss Joyce by accidentally throwing pennies at her when she's singing a poorly received song at a night club -- may be good looking, but his line readings, even by the standards of the movie, are awful. Even the songs, written by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, are poor. Styne's music is, as usual fine, but the lyrics to "Who Are The British?", instead of talking about the ordinary people, rattles off a bunch of famous people.

With all those errors in mind, the fact that there's a picture on the wall of Churchill where the King should be is just another item in a checklist that includes poor lip-syncing, bad accents, thinking that dressing rural English people like hillbillies, and wasting Elsa Lanchester are good ideas.

Of course, this is a Republic Picture, and was never thought likely to play to an audience that would notice these things. This was a wartime flag-waver, intended to show the company's rural and small-town audiences that the British were not waiting around for the United States to save them; they were working hard. However the execution is so slovenly as to be offensive.

This Republic programmer mainly set in a British aircraft factory has a largely British cast that pitch in gamely and a plot that anticipates the British 'Millions Like Us', released a few months later. The stress on doing your bit to "manufacture those grey hairs for that nasty man in Germany", as well as a couple of sequences sternly stressing the need to observe health and safety regulations to the letter makes it feel like a public information film, sweetened with frequent songs, including a duet between J.Pat O'Malley and Elsa Lanchester which marks one of Elsa's final film appearances in a youthful role before she became typecast as middle-aged (and then elderly) eccentrics.