eddie-83

I saw "A Royal night Out" at a preview in Melbourne tonight. The film concerns the Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth having a night out in London to celebrate VE (Victory in Europe) Day in 1945. The Queen, played by Emily Watson bearing a remarkable resemblance to the late Queen Elizabeth, firmly forbids the teenage sisters to go out but the slightly stammering King George(remember 'The King's Speech'?)succumbs to Daddy's girls' pleading and sends them forth with two army officers chaperoning. I found these two clowns totally unfunny but there was laughter in the audience. Needless to say much high jinx ensue, most of it totally unlikely to me but I did enjoy the Glen Miller music and there were involving scenes before dawn. Unchallenging entertainment.

While there's probably not much that's new here "Inside the Dream Factory" is fine for movie buffs. It's the usual formula of Talking Heads and film clips with the heads including Virginia Mayo, June Allyson, Janet Leigh, Jackie Cooper etc., etc., telling us how it was. Faye Dunaway hosts looking lovely in a powder blue trouser suit and at just over an hour it doesn't outstay its welcome.

Among tit-bits of information we're told that a star of "It's Always Fair Weather" was a cross-dresser but not which one. I was also amused to learn that Press Agents were known as Suppress Agents as their main role was to keep bad publicity out of the papers. Things have changed! If you think you'd like "Inside the Dream Factory" you probably will.

After reading all the positive comments on Ring-a-Ding Rhythm it seems a shame to criticize but here goes.

I thought the movie was awful, leads Douglas and Shapiro couldn't act (they made a total of one more film between them!), the "pop' performers were bland with the songs totally forgettable and it's obvious why the British trad jazz craze was soon blown away by the Beatles et al.

Speaking of the Beatles, I couldn't for the life of me see, though of course others did, how Richard Lester was given two Beatles films to direct on the strength of this. All the humour here was, to me, embarrassingly, excruciatingly unfunny.

One other thing that bothered me was the glorification of smoking. Two singers, John Leyton and Gene McDaniels actually drew on cigarettes while they were singing, "Mister" Acker Bilk had a lit cigarette between his fingers as he played his clarinet and legendary Australian DJ Alan "Fluff" Freeman is seldom seen without a smoke.

Sorry, fans, I hated it.