A Yank in Ermine

Eastman Colour (sic) has been lavished on this tinny comedy with a noisy score by Stanley Black in which stereotypes abound as three American goodwill ambassadors hit a sleepy English village as wintry as the welcome they receive.

The colour process was new then, hence the strange makeup some of the cast wear.

The premise is just to get a supposedly 'box-office' American or two into a film to get the finance. An American in uniform inherits a village. Lots of raucous 'jazz' music drowns any sort of emotional empathy, along with a woman who 'dances' in gold lamé, wearing what appear to be a pair of marigold washing-up gloves. It deteriorates from then on, with the likes of Wattis, Pertwee and Beckwith playing English characters, Sid James playing the Afrikaaner version of a comic and a whole string of Ealing studio clichés. Puts bums on seats- in the pub next door! The polo game with the brightly coloured balls, the Rolls that would have been ancient even then and the chauffeur in a luminous scarlet uniform seem to be quintessentially English to the directors of this mash-up. The straight actors seem to be delivering the lame script with sincerity, but I'm guessing they didn't carry clips from this time waster in their casting portfolios.

A Yank in Ermine is a passable low budget film made in colour. It is notable for having a couple of actors such as Jon Pertwee and Sidney James who appeared in the Carry On movies.

Peter Thompson is a solid American airman Joe Turner who is informed that he has inherited an Earldom, a seat in the House of Lords and a fortune of over £1 million.

Turner is unsure if he wants to give up his American citizenship and visits the UK to see if he likes the place. He brings along his two air force buddies. He leaves behind his fiance Gloria, a nightclub singer.

In the village which has his ancestral home. Turner and his friends are having difficulties adjusting to British life, the beer is warm and sports such as croquet is difficult to grasp. However Turner falls for the daughter of the neighbouring landowner but she too is engaged.

Pretty soon his friends thinking Turner might be homesick ask Gloria to pop over to Britain. Her arrival causes complications.

As a fish out of water comedy, this should had been a charming comedy with mismatched couples who eventually find true love. Unfortunately Thompson is bland, there is no spikiness in the writing and little comedy. It is left to the better known actors such as Wattis, Pertwee and James to make something out of the material.

They used to call these British movies 'Mid-Atlantic' as they thought they might attract American film-goers if they included a few has-been American actors. This type of movie eventually brought the UK film industry to its knees. The premise is so dull: a Yank comes to little old England with its quaint customs and people . Yawn yawn of course he gets to like it and finds true love. One awful bit is when the hero is supposedly riding a winning horse and he is so obviously in a studio set on some kind of rocking bench.

A brief cameo from Sid James. The village used is Turville Buckinghamshire and for once they used the real name of the pub the 'Bull and Butcher'

Yet another film, where our American cousins, courtesy of an American airman, Joe Turner, played by Peter Thompson, and his two 'buddies,' encounter the upper crust of English society. The contrived plot, whereby Thompson inherits the title of 'Earl,' gives the writers plenty of opportunity to trot out the usual contrasting hackneyed phrases and different forms of social etiquette, which expose the cultural differences between two English speaking countries. The differences are literally 'hammered home' by Thompson's 'buddy' 'Slowburn'' played by Jon Pertwee, no less, dressed in very loud clothes, repeating 'yeah' all the time and speaking in an excruciating phoney New York, Bronx nasal accent. The other 'buddy' called, 'Butch,' played by Harold Lloyd Junior, has little to say or do, but merely act as a shadow to Peter Thompson. Sid James, has a cameo part as a cigar chewing, nightclub owner, but is far from convincing, let down by a poor accent and a tendency to 'overdo' it on the trite American 'gangster' phrases. The English aristocrats likewise are simply cardboard stereotypes, with the 'wolfish cad' being played by Guy Middleton, who refers to any lady he meets as 'old girl' and Richard Wattis, playing the very posh and stuffy butler, who is shocked and mortified by the informality of the three American guests, who have invaded the aristocratic home of his 'master' played by Edward Chapman, the Duke of Fontenham. The cultural differences, which are at the heart of the film, simply fail to summon up amusement or humour, hence the tempo of the film is all very tedious and flat. Thompson's romance with Angela, the Duke's daughter, played Noelle Middleton, is dull and lacks any form of sparkle. Her BBC, RADA voice, and her one dimensional responses, renders the 'romantic' scenes as yawn inducing.

Sadly, this was nothing more then a 'time filler' film, before the main feature. Great waste of talent.