Up with the Lark

The music hall team of Revnell & West were popular on radio and like Fred Allen looked funny enough to work well in films too. This sequel to 'The Balloon Goes Up' (1942) sadly proved their only other film vehicle since Gracie West (the little one) had to retire shortly afterwards due to ill health. This film therefore provides a valuable record of the pair in full flight.

Shot in just five weeks at Merton Park and on a farm in Sutton, the plot is the old Scooby Doo standby about black marketeers frightening away the locals with fake ghosts. More elaborate compared to it's extremely perfunctory predecessor, in addition to good photography by Stephen Dade, it also gives brief but showily offbeat roles to Ian Fleming & Ivor Barnard.

A real find...!

This now-forgotten comedy team had a long run in England as a stage and radio act, known as The Long and the Short. They appeared in a handful of movies in the 1930s and 40s, and this was their final appearance.

Ethel Revnell (the tall one) takes center stage here with Gracie West (the short one) tagging along. They play a pair of inept switchboard operators who get fired but then catch their boss loading up a truck with goods. They suspect black market doings and investigate. But they get caught in a police raid and are jailed.

Because they can identify the crooks that got away, they are enlisted by the coppers to pose as "land girls" and go to work on a farm where they can spy on the crooks. Of course the two city girls don't get along with farm work and comedy ensues. Revnell also sings "Up with the Lark" and " Let's Go Cuckoo."

Their broad brand of comedy (think Abbott and Costello) was popular in the day though today it seems quite over the top. Film co-stars Lesley Osmond as Mabel, Ivor Barnard as the ghost, Ian Fleming as Swallow, Anthony Holles as Martel, and Anthony Hulme as Britt.

Released on DVD along with their THE BALLOON GOES UP.

I must say I don't find this duo very funny - frantic yes but the taller of the two acts too grotesque for my taste. However this is quite a quality production with a good cast who had done and would do better things (Ivor Barnard was later 1953 to star alongside Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida and Robert Morley as a vicious homicidal Major (rtd) in John Huston's "Beat the Devil").

But there, for me at least, is a sudden surprise - a criminal gang in order keep people from a graveyard they are using for their own purposes, hits on the idea of having a "ghost" scare people away. A figure in a skeleton outfit emerges vertically from behind a tombstone. It is very striking and very memorable. Worth enduring the first 30 mins just to see.

Watched this at 6.30 in the morning on Talking Pictures.Found myself smiling and an longing for the day when Political Correctness was not king and when everyone could just put their foot in it and laugh.Not these days when you have to look over your shoulder at every utterance.