Review of The Singer Not the Song

What glorious fun.Mr Bogarde was never more arch,Mr Mills never more out of his depth. The script was written by the bloke who invented the "Aero" and only had slightly less holes.Miss Mylene Demongeot clearly had no idea of what was going on and the rest of the cast must have had a lot of fun keeping it a secret. This was 1961 and the term "Homoerotic" was scarcely common coinage,most of Mr Bogarde's fans were female and blissfully unaware that a lot of chaps found those tight leather trousers just as attractive as they.Pity about the hat though. At the time it was thought "The singer not the song" had dealt a fatal blow to the British Film Industry,but as so often before and since,reports of its death were exaggerated.Good-looking sophisticated nicely brought up actors however dropped rather alarmingly from the radar as the New Wave - more like a tsunami in its affect - swept into the studios. In the ensuing decade of whippet and Woodbine sagas the ability to eat peas with a fork became less of a requirement,more of a liability. Mr Bogarde did not like Mr Mills despite the fact that he was shorter and considerably less pretty than himself and was not a happy bunny when he was cast as the priest.He spent most of the movie in the world's longest hissy fit which he does well to disguise fairly effectively. Don't for a minute take it seriously - obviously nobody else did - and it's the funniest and campest thing since "Escape to Burma".If some enterprising company was to issue both of these hilarious movies on one DVD they'd clean up,they really would.