It is three years after the end of the Second World War, and the government has made good on its promises of a future and a job for everyone. All except for Peter Graves. He may have been a hot-shot fighter pilot during the war, but now he is quite content to live in his father's latest luxury hotel and eat out in quest of adventure and beautiful women. He finds both at a restaurant which is the front for a club called the White Elephants, all sworn to observing the world's problems and doing nothing about them. He is smitten with Russian Margaret Lockwood and her eleven-year-old sister, played by fifteen-year-old Jean Simmons in her movie debut. He swears to obey the club's rules and never work. But disaster strikes! His father, Frank Cellier, leaves the hotel, making him manager..... and work is forbidden by the laws of this new society he has sworn to uphold.
It's another movie based on one of the silly novels written by S. J. Simon and Caryl Brahms, a series of collaborations they had begun when Miss Brahms wanted to write a novel about killing a ballet critic she hated. It's a pleasure to see Miss Lockwood out of her English Rose persona, and she is quite funny. Director Val Guest has assembled a talented collection of farceurs, including Vic Oliver, Irene Handl, and others usually better remembered for their dramatic thesping, including Roland Culver and Gibb McLaughlin. If the pace seems more frantically forced on occasion, the individual bits are certainly funny enough to keep it going.
