Deux des commandos

A thoroughly enjoyable English comedy but the inimitable Cecil Parker who although he saw service in WWI he forgot his training. When John LeMesurier enters the room and salutes a hatless Group Captain, Cecil returns the salute. In the British Services one salutes the uniform not the individual and as hatless, the Group Captain does not merit a salute, merely coming to attention suffices. Cecil should have known this.

A sly cockney (Alfred Lynch) and a rather dim gypsy (Sean Connery) team up during World War II to turn events to their own financial advantage. Note for pub quiz players. Sean Connery's last role before playing James Bond was this one: playing a thick-as-short-planks Gypsy! Whether the casting people saw this before they gave him the role is open to doubt, but I believe that he plays stupid better than he plays clever. Do you believe that Connery really had a double first and could speak fluent Japanese? Well that is what 007 is supposed to be! But I digress. This is what I actually like in a cheap and cheerful film. Give us a bit of everything from comedy to drama and keep it rolling along before we get bored. They are not really con men, but fly-by-nights that want to turn everything to their own advantage. Laughable small timers really. The film changes tone at the end from comedic to dramatic as the twosome have to do a bit of real fighting instead of skiving. Looks a bit out of place, but brings in the twist that was sure to be coming. Not that great a movie, but star power and character acting keep us involved to the finish. If you give this movie a chance you will probably find that you are in it for the full term. Lots of fun - but only B movie candy floss.

You could never have made a service comedy like On The Fiddle during the World War II years in the United Kingdom. When the UK was fighting for its very life with Hitler only hours away by air, a film with the central character of a conman slacker like Alfred Lynch would have gone over like a lead dirigible. You could do it the USA with us thousands of miles away, but not then in the UK.

Lynch is a fabulous character though, a cockney conman who gets pinched peddling his wares at a recruitment station line and then has to enlist to prove those were his intentions being there. But once in the service he sees Ferengi like lucrative opportunities to make business killings.

His best friend turns out to be an amiable and diffident Sean Connery who just cheerfully accepts life as it comes. He and Lynch become quite a team in their business enterprises and in their skillful avoidance of where the fighting is until almost the end of the war.

The film also has in it the presence of American comedian Alan King of our Army Airs Corps who is as skilled an operator for the Yanks as Lynch and Connery are for their king and country. King was a rising star at the time, Ed Sullivan always had him on his variety show several times a year and no doubt his presence helped sell the film on this side of the pond.

Two great British character actors are here as well. Cecil Parker playing a most pompous air marshal who just can't quite put these guys out of business. Their enterprises do come to his attention. And Stanley Holloway plays a butcher with whom they go into profit selling black market beef from the RAF Commissary. And to hear them tell it, Lynch and Connery are doing a patriotic service as well as making a few bucks on the side.

It's been said that Sean Connery shows no gift for comedy. If you saw A Fine Madness you might have some grounds for saying that, but in On The Fiddle, he's quite droll in some of the lines he drops. Anyway his fans will not be disappointed.

On the Fiddle is a passable film with Alfred Lynch in a rare leading role as Horace Pope a spiv type scam artist who ends up being sent to the army by a judge.

Once he has joined up he teams up with dim witted but amiable squaddie Pedlar Pascoe (Sean Connery) who tags along with his money making schemes and provides the brawn to his brains.

The duo accidentally become war heroes, then end up running a pub serving US based soldiers.

Connery would go on to become James Bond a year later so here is a role where he is kind of cast against type. Lynch better known as a shifty type character actor rather enjoys being in the limelight as the star but he really is charmless and unsympathetic here, more a third rate and not nice Sergeant Bilko.

The movie has a host of familiar faces ranging from Lance Percival to Barbara Windsor.

A film that hasn't "dated", a good script and full of all the reliable British actors of the time. Alfred Lynch is superb as the main RAF "spiv" charachter supported by a subdued Sean Connery. The US comparisons with Sgt Bilko are very valid and in the same way that Bilko had the strength in some brilliant minor cast members, so it is with "On the Fiddle". A really good "watch" for Sunday afternoon TV and although there are a few touches of "farce" around it captures the feeling of ordinary Service life towards the end of World War II extremely accurately. Alfred Lynch was a real class British actor who drew brilliantly on his East End background for many of his films. I was sad to hear of his untimely death just before Christmas (2003).