Voyage en Birmanie

"Lilacs in the Spring" is a very confusing and, in my opinion, ill-conceived film. There's plenty of stuff to like in the movie (such as seeing Errol Flynn dance for, I think, the second time in a movie)....but the sum total just didn't work for me.

The film begins during the later portion of the Blitz in London...1944. The story follows Carole Beaumont (Anna Naegel) through a story and multiple flashback scenes. After getting bumped around by a bomb explosion, Carole believes she's back in the time of Charles II of Britain. The man playing Charles in this flashback is her boyfriend, Charles. Later, she has another flashback during which she's Queen Victoria hanging out with her husband, Albert....who is played by another one of Carole's boyfriends. Later, there is a LONG flashback, though from whose viewpoint, I have no idea! You see Carole's parents dating (played by Flynn and Naegle) which is confusing, as Flynn plays both father AND lover to two different characters played by Naegle (the mother and then daughter)! It's a bit creepy...and confusing...and it doesn't fit in at all with the previous two flashbacks. In fact, this flashback really is like a whole separate movie!

The bottom line is that the script just seemed like a mess. The singing, dancing and story (at times) were nice but the whole package was just strange and confusing...like it needed a revision to the script. It also would have helped to have two different actresses play Carole and her mother. A misfire.

Late Flynn, when he took almost any work he could get to pay off alimony. He turns in a sincere, believable performance, occasionally lampooning himself, and does a creditable song and dance number. Other points of interest include Peter Graves as Prince Albert (if you didn't know, you'd never guess) and Sean Connery is supposedly in there somewhere as an extra, but I haven't found him.

When the producing/acting team of Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle got Errol Flynn he was willing to work for just about anything in Lilacs In The Spring. He owed the US government a lot of back taxes and was abroad so he couldn't be arrested for same and his epic William Tell had gone belly up. So the Wilcoxes were able to get Flynn for a fraction of his asking price from a decade ago for this Neagle film.

In it Anna Neagle plays a musical comedy star and her own daughter, in addition to reprising two of her previous screen roles in dream sequences, Queen Victoria and Nell Gwynn. The frequent use of flashbacks and imaginary sequences is going to leave the viewer quite a bit confused.

As for Errol Flynn he's both husband and father to Anna Neagle in her two different guises. The young Anna Neagle is caught between two suitors, producer David Farrar and stagedoor johnny Peter Graves. That is not the Peter Graves of Mission Impossible.

Neagle sings beautifully of course, she was one of the United Kingdom's premier musical comedy stars as well as a film star. As for Flynn he does a nice song and dance to Lily Of Laguna, but compare it to the number he did in Thank Your Lucky Stars with Warner Brothers during World War II, That's What You Jolly Well Get. Errol's aged quite considerably and it shows.

I wish both of these stars had teamed years earlier because they're a bit long in the tooth for this material, especially Flynn.

I was too young to be an Anna Neagle fan, but after seeing her in ' Lilacs in the Spring ' I can well understand that she had a number one following in the UK for many decades. She danced superbly, and her flirtatious charm showed how elegant and sophisticated she was on stage and screen. Her films are rarely shown, and despite her reputation she has fallen into that eclipse called time. We live in another world now, far away from her death in 1986. As for this film, found second hand on DVD I will treasure it if alone for the ' Lilacs in the Spring ' song by the great Ivor Novello at the end, where she is dancing and singing to troops in Burma towards the end of World War 2. Herbert Wilcox, her husband directed and he was not the best of directors, and sadly she worked with almost only him on film. And yet her presence surmounts any doubts about her own greatness. Now the plot. Suffering from concussion after a Blitz attack she dreams of other times, and again takes on her former roles as Queen Victoria and Nell Gwynne. Her mother another actor is played by herself and a feat in itself. She is loved by an actor played by Erroll Flynn. The chemistry between them works well, and I gladly give this film a 9. A past age, and one we risk forgetting. If the plot seems complicated it isn't. I recommend a UK television showing of many of her films.

After production of Errol Flynn's financial debacle, WILLIAM TELL, was halted, the actor discovered that he not only had lost the money he'd invested in the project, but that his long-time business manager had been swindling him for years, as well. Fighting bankruptcy, the aging one-time 'King' of Hollywood swashbucklers found himself desperately in need of work, to stave off an army of creditors. Fortunately, legendary British producer/director Herbert Wilcox liked the high-living star, and, realizing that Flynn's name still had marquee value in England, cast him opposite his wife, popular British actress Anna Neagle, in the filming of her recent stage success, 'The Glorious Days', retitled LILACS IN THE SPRING.

A sentimental tale told largely in flashback, Neagle portrays an English stage star who is injured in a WWII air raid. Flying from Hollywood, her long-estranged father, film star John Beaumont (Flynn, with silver hair) must deal with an army of the press, and her would-be beau, British army officer Charles King (David Farrar). Meanwhile, Neagle, unconscious, hallucinates herself as being legendary star Nell Gywn, and Queen Victoria. Upon seeing her father, she relives her mother's early life, when she was 'discovered' by Beaumont in his days as a vaudevillian song-and-dance man (Flynn gets a chance to do a bit of soft shoe, singing 'Lily of Laguna', and making up for his limited musical ability with abundant charm). As her star ascends, his declines, and after leaving the stage to fight in WWI, he returns to find himself a forgotten man. Hollywood beckons, however, and he sees an opportunity to strike it rich as an actor in motion pictures. She refuses to leave England, and the couple separate. Achieving stardom in America, Beaumont is far too involved in his career to get to know his daughter...until her injury reminds him of how much he loved her mother, and needed to know her.

Maudlin, yes, but British audiences loved this kind of tearjerker, which offered several well-choreographed production numbers with Neagle...and, if you look carefully among the silhouetted male dancers during a tango, you'll find 24-year old Sean Connery, unbilled, and fresh from the chorus of a London stage revival of 'South Pacific'.

While the film bombed in the U.S. (under the title LET'S MAKE UP), it was popular enough in the U.K. to keep Errol Flynn working, and his creditors at bay for a little longer. Next on his agenda would be his very last swashbuckler, THE DARK AVENGER...