An Alligator Named Daisy

With a cast of stalwart British character actors and pleasing photography of 1950s Britain, I had hoped and expected to be more entertained by this film. Unfortunately I found myself glued to it for the wrong reasons - I couldn't quite believe how awful it was. I must have watched thousands of old films and am always ready to make allowances for them being products of their time, but this was really hard going.

As others have noted, a major problem is that it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be: a gentle romantic comedy, a slapstick comedy or a musical. I was a bit gobsmacked when Jeannie Carson suddenly broke into song about 15 minutes in! It's not believable on any level, either the storyline itself or the fact that Daisy never appears to have an ounce of menace in her at any time. Other aspects which defied credibility included the casting of suave Donald Sinden as a songwriter (a songwriter for God's sake!), the fact he has Diana Dors for a fiancée and doesn't appear to have the slightest interest in her (I mean, Diana Dors! Come on!) and a ludicrous scene in a song publisher's office. The whole thing's silly in the worst possible way.

If I had to pick a favourite scene it would be the one at the very beginning with that wonderful actor Wilfred Lawson - after that everything went downhill in a big way.

Peter Weston is engaged to Vanessa Colebrook, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. On a journey home on a steamer he meets an old sea hand who shares with him how his wife won't let him keep his pet Daisy anymore. Weston offers him a kind ear and the sailor takes him for a kind man. When Weston wakes up later in the journey he finds that the sailor has left Daisy in his care. The problem is that Daisy is a middle sized alligator. Whilst trying to throw the beast overboard, he meets Moira who helps him out. He is desperate to see her again and uses the alligator as an excuse – however keeping a girlfriend, an alligator and a fiancée are not all easy tasks to carry out simultaneously.

I was attracted to this film by the title as much as anything else. The film is amiable enough but doesn't seem to know what it wants to be – is it a musical or is it a comedy or is it a romance? The musical section has some nice moments but really lacks a push in terms of choreography. Also some of the songs are a little lacklustre. One of the better songs is sung in a garage and 6 red oil drums seem to sit immobile in the foreground – not used in any meaningful way, but just sitting there, seemed rather pointless to me. The comedy aspect is OK but it is rarely laugh out loud funny. It is good enough to keep you with a weird half-smile on your face for half the time but not much more than that. There are some nice touches but nothing that'll have you rolling – most of it involves an alligator being where you don't expect it to be.

The romance aspect didn't work for me because of the fact Weston was making woo at someone else while he was engaged to someone else. While Moira did her bit, I found Weston himself to be a bit stale and certainly not likeable enough to get past the whole cheating issue.

In that regard, the very young looking Donald Sinden was maybe not the best choice for the lead although he does alright in some bits he just needed more charisma. Carson is a bubbly redhead and brings her bits to life, by comparison Dors is very beautiful but a lot less fun to have onscreen. The support cast are all quite amusing and there are some (very brief) cameos near the end from Nicholas Parsons and Frankie Howerd. Daisy herself is quite wooden – or rather rubbery – for the whole film. For longer scenes where she is needed in the shot it is laughably evident that this thing has just been placed in position and left there!

Overall this is an average film that is worth seeing because it is quite charming in a very dated way. The main problem will be that it doesn't totally deliver on any one of the three genres that it tries to cover and ends up falling short of them all.

I was wondering about the alligators... how did they get so many to be around people and were they really as friendly as they looked? I thought all reptiles, alligators and crocodiles, were a dangerous species and are harmful to humans! Did all those people and alligators swim safely together in the pool towards the end of the movie? Back in the 1950's ,was the film industry careful about harming animals or in this case hurting people? Did "Daisy" really have a lead on a get walked around? They were rather decent sized alligators, one snap and you are seriously bitten... was anyone actually hurt during the filing with these creatures?

My Grandmothers Cousin, Maurice Johnson, looked after the alligator 'Daisy' at his home in Parkstone (near Bournemouth). The alligator was really male. I believe he was a theatrical agent. He was also a friend of naturalist Gerald Durrell. The alligator grew bigger and eventually went to Jersey Zoo. I know that many of the animals that eventually went to Jersey Zoo in the late fifties were kept at the boarding house of Gerald's sister, Margaret Durrell, in Bournemouth. I too have always wondered about the safety issues and how many real alligators were used, especially during the pool scene. The film is a quirky mix of slapstick comedy and odd musical numbers. However it is brimming over with famous faces which adds to it's quaint charm to make it just about a success.

Rank International made some pretty odd films in their time, and in this semi-comedy, semi-musical, they don't quite seem to know where this one is going. Donald Sinden plays a music shop assistant, Peter, who gets lumbered with Daisy the alligator on his trip home from holiday, during which time he has met Irish zoo employee Moira. Moira has a few musical numbers which seem a little misplaced. Back home is Peter's girlfriend, Vanessa (Diana Dors), obviously from a rich family (her overbearing father has a huge house), and his parents and grandfather (Stanley Holloway). There's also a dotty pet shop owner who 'talks' to animals by breathing down their noses, and several small or cameo parts for the likes of Frankie Howerd, Jimmy Edwards, Joan Hickson, and Gilbert Harding, plus an early showy role for Stephen Boyd in the last bit of the film. Daisy is sometimes a real alligator, and sometimes clearly not ... when she is real she does the usual things that animals do to disrupt people, before everything is fixed to everyone's advantage at the end.