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).

It involves a variety of directors, including Andre Charlot, Jack Hulbert, Paul Murray, and Alfred Hitchcock. The film is comprised of short segments, usually stagebound, with singers, dancers, comedians, and assorted musicians, hosted by MC Tommy Handley, and also using a wraparound segment involving some people trying to watch the program on a primitive television, the development of which was in the news in the UK at the time. The performers include Donald Calthrop, Teddy Brown, The Three Eddies, Helen Burnell, Bobby Comber, Will Fyfe, and Anna May Wong, among many others.

This works best as a snapshot of the vaudeville-style entertainment of the time, often corny and grating, and occasionally inspired. Some segments are in Pathecolor, a technique wherein the frames were hand-colored. I enjoyed Calthrop's recurring gag as a would-be Shakespearean actor struggling to perform some of the Bard's works but always being interrupted. Hitchcock, whose participation has kept this from disappearing into obscurity, reportedly directed the interstitial bits with the people trying to watch TV. Not among the highlights of his career, to be sure.

Recommended for film historians interested in British film. All others YMMV.

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

This is interesting as a period piece. It is also of interest to Hitchcock fans.

Rather like the better-known American film King of Jazz, it is a collection of sketches albeit from the British music halls. Alas, this film is not nearly so good.

Sadly the music hall acts do not work so well on film. Will Fyffe, composer of "I Belong to Glasgow" in particular dies the death of a dog in a ditch.

There is a little Russian folk instruments orchestra who are uncredited. They probably only cost the studio ten pounds for the lot, and they may have been the same musicians who accompanied the great bass singer Fyodor Shalyapin on some of his best known records. To me they are the one act who come across well in this film. (Unlike Will Fyffe, balalaikas and domras will hold their own anywhere.) Sadly we may never know their names.

I doubt if the film makers were aware that what they were producing was a time capsule.

A distinctly off-form Tommy Handley introduces this rather curious piece of cinematic entertainment that features a variety of stars from the British stage at the end of the 1920s. The mixture of musical, comedy and magical turns illustrates well just quite how a real pot-pourri of acts took to the stage in theatres up and down the UK - but there is no audience. Without the engagement, even applause, from those watching the whole thing comes across as a rather sterile collection of concert performances, as if filmed in an empty television studio. It has a couple of rather tenuous continuing threads that try to hold it together - one features a fellow with an elementary television trying, unsuccessfully usually, to catch some of the performance on his set. The other, has a more contrived Shakesperian theme to it that coupled with a lot of Handley's equally over-cooked links make this all rather a disjointed, and frankly rather staccato film to watch. As a curiosity, it is certainly worth a watch - but mainly just as a bit of nostalgia.