Review of No Limit

No Limit (1935)
7/10
Love It!
4 April 2006
The greatest movie of all time this isn't. I don't think it ever tried to be. It's a vehicle of George "oooh, mother!" Formby and his ukelele, in an era when Vaudeville was coughing up blood and there was a pool of talent going idle (assuming you consider the ukelele a talent!). It's lots of fun, and entirely predictable - underdog battles the odds, has a few scrapes, but gets the girl (and other things) in the end, baddies roundly thrashed, and all to the strains of the obligatory musical numbers that permeate the movie. I grew up on the Isle of Man and used to marshal on the TT course - there wasn't a year went by that at least one rider didn't have his machine painted in the Shuttleworth Snap checkerboard pattern, such is the legacy of this movie in the road-racing fraternity. Filmed almost entirely on location, it cuts in archive race footage (amazing to see what's changed and what hasn't) and it's sublimely ridiculous. If you're a road-racer, or know people who are, this is a must. For everyone else, it's a maybe. Bizarrely, in the scene at the beginning of the big race, there is a swastika flag flying from the grandstand. It's customary to fly the flags of all of the countries that the competitors are from, and I guess in 1936 there were German riders - still, it's a little strange to see it there, looks out of place.
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