Reviews

"Lilacs in the Spring" (or "Let's Make Up" as it was released in the USA) is a very strange film. I should admit that I saw this in a truly awful print, with terrible color and some chunks, small or otherwise, apparently missing, so the film may actually be marginally less strange than I think. Still, it's very badly constructed. The first half hour or so, some of it in black-and-white, offers us Anna Neagle as a young woman during World War II trying to decide between two suitors. I suspect Anna Neagle is an acquired taste, especially for an American like myself, and I haven't acquired it. Her acting is acceptable, her dancing is fine, her singing is well-trained, but she isn't particularly appealing. There's something brittle and artificial about her that obviously excited British audiences during and just after the war (she was an enormous star in her native country, thanks at least in part to the exertions of her husband, directed Herbert Wilcox).

It doesn't help that her two suitors are no more appealing than she is. Peter Graves (not the American actor) makes literally no impression as a shy, mild-mannered soldier with a German accent (his character's father is supposed to have been German), and is only marginally more interesting as Prince Albert (Neagle's character has a dream sequence in which she's Queen Victoria). David Farrar is, if anything, even less attractive as an overbearing stage director.

This tedious story line is then pushed aside for another flashback which takes up the bulk of the film, and it's here that "Lilacs in the Spring" becomes watchable, because it's here that Errol Flynn takes over. He was in his mid-forties by now (and looking at least ten years older), but he's the only one in the film with star quality, and he has it in spades. He's also an extremely convincing actor in this role - a self-confident song-and-dance man who woos and weds Anna Neagle's character's mother (also played by Anna Neagle) and propels her to stardom, while his own career heads downhill. As a showcase for Anna Neagle, the introduction of Flynn is something of a tactical error - he has extraordinary charm and energy and he makes every other actor in the vicinity look unnecessary, with the exception of Kathleen Harrison, who's always fun to watch.

And that's the problem - unlike Flynn, and despite all the lavish musical numbers designed to show off her talents, Neagle isn't particularly interesting to watch on screen. The flashback story engulfs the rest of the film to the point where we just couldn't care less - if we had cared at all - whom the "younger" Neagle character decides to marry.

It's worth watching to see Errol Flynn at his best - not as a swashbuckler, but as a performer.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Britain's Ealing Studios specialized in wonderful comedies ("The Titfield Thunderbolt", "Passport to Pimlico", "Whisky Galore", et al.) in each of which a group of quirky individuals in a small community would band together against a common threat. If Ealing had made "The Happy Family (Mr. Lord Says No)", it might have been much more fun than it is. Unfortunately, once the basic premise has been stated - a family refuses to sell its house to the government, which wants to demolish it and build a road to the Festival of Britain site - precious little is done with it. The family members (and a housecrashing BBC reporter) barricade themselves in. The government lays siege to the house. The family fights back. The government gives in. That's it, folks. While most of the actors are predictably good, particularly Stanley Holloway, Kathleen Harrison and Dandy Nichols, none of the characters is terribly interesting. There is some toothless satire of the British civil service and of the BBC (both of its representatives come off as queenishly gay, which tells us something of the filmmakers' attitudes to the BBC at the time). The most interesting thing about the film is its literal glimpse at postwar London under construction for the Festival of Britain. Nothing starring Holloway and Harrison can be all bad, and "The Happy Family" is by no means awful, but there's not much to it - and the final moments of the film are too bizarre even for a gag.

Maybe it's just my advancing years (I was born the year "This Island Earth" was released), but this movie is actually more entertaining now than it was when I first saw it on (black-and-white) television about 40 years ago. At the beginning of the 50s boom, most of the major studios produced at least one first-rate science fiction that has stood, however arthritically, the test of time: "The Thing" (RKO), "Them!" (Warner Brothers), "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (20th Century Fox), "Forbidden Planet" (MGM). Universal's entry, purportedly 2-1/2 years in the making, was "This Island Earth," and if it lacks the intellectual pretensions of the Fox and MGM offerings, it's also much less of a classy horror film than the RKO and Warner classics. In fact, more than any other film I can think of (except possibly "Forbidden Planet"), it creates the same sense of wonder that I felt in my early teens when reading the paperback science fiction novels of the Golden Age (1940-1975, in my opinion).

Universal put some money into this one. The sets and special effects are still impressive, especially once the hero and heroine reach Metaluna - in fact the last twenty minutes of this film contain some truly unforgettable, bleakly violent visuals, reminiscent of the "Galaxy" and "Fantastic Universe" magazine covers of the 1950s. Most of the acting is quite stylish, particularly in the cases of Jeff Morrow and Rex Reason. Faith Domergue suffers from the usual fate of 1950s heroines, and in fact "This Island Earth" only sinks into imbecility near the very end, when this brilliant female scientist starts shrieking and running around in circles trying to escape a giant insect-man with pincers for hands.

For those of us who love 50s science fiction films, this is a touchstone.