Parla elstree

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.

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).

In producing this brand-new singing, dancing, all-talkie film, British International Pictures inadvertently contrived to preserve a cross-section of the contemporary London stage scene from the West End to the music halls. Sit back in your seat, enjoy the entertainment beamed directly to your home (I had no idea that television existed in the popular perception long before the BBC), and let yourself be carried away back to the days of 1930, flitting from venue to venue to experience a night out in the London of the era. Some of the acts are to one taste, some to another, but you've paid for the programme as a whole so applaud and wait to see what's coming next.

My personal favourite would be the live-wire tapping and jazzy tunes of the Three Eddies' blackface act (especially the skeleton dance!), but while overall I was interested in this revue chiefly for the music -- it features unknown (at least to me) tunes by Vivian Ellis and Ivor Novello, for example -- there's a good deal else that's worth enjoying, and a few tantalising glimpses 'backstage' at the Elstree studios as well.

"Elstree Calling" was edited on the cheap and rushed out in ten days for a hasty release to recoup the cost of production, and it shows. Few of the five or six camera angles filmed on every shot actually got used, for instance, and a number of bizarre choices seem to have been made, such as choosing to show a dance sequence via a camera focused too high and showing a vast expanse of curtain above the performers' heads but cutting off their actual feet -- or a shot that shows the performers disappearing off the left-hand side of the frame while focusing on the empty set centre-stage. Did anybody even take the trouble to screen these clips before attaching them together? (Director Adrian Brunel, who had left detailed directions for the compilation of his footage only for them to be totally ignored, complained in his autobiography "How could the Hulbert-Courtneidge numbers be slung together like that without looking like casual newsreel photographing?")

I was also a bit puzzled by the smoke that appears to be pouring out of the top of the jaw-droppingly gigantic image of 'Little' Teddy Brown in the background of his first musical interlude -- presumably a side-effect of the stage lighting? But it isn't just the editing: certainly in the chorus sequences, the choreography tends to suffer from being cramped onto a film set, while no-one seems to yet have worked out how to avoid having a long line of girls strung out across the middle of a square-format screen. (See, e.g. the chorus sequences in British-Gaumont's "First a Girl" for more sophisticated treatment later in the Thirties.)

Still, I found this glimpse onto the theatre world of the era thoroughly enjoyable: it was particularly interesting after having screened the shorts in the silent "On With the Dance" series of only a few years only, since the styles are very similar but obviously this time with music. Just don't expect cinema: theatre is what is advertised, and theatre is what you will get -- though there is a brief homage to the antics of Douglas Fairbanks in the burlesque "Taming of the Shrew" that closes the act!

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.

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.