To hell with Hitler

A couple of months back, TCM ran a night of movies starring a British entertainer I hadn't heard of before, George Formby. Formby was a ukulele-strumming singer/comic actor who was extremely popular during World War II, as can be seen in a movie like Let George Do It!. (One of the few Formby movies to get a release in the US, it was re-titled To Hell With Hitler on this side of the Atlantic.)

Formby plays George Hepplewhite, the ukulele player for a combo known as the Dinky Doos. His band has just arrived in Southampton, where they're informed that they've got a job up in Blackpool. However, as the war has recently begun, there's a blackout on and gettin to the train is going to be a bit of a pain. Meanwhile, there's a band in Bergen, Norway (Norway not yet having been occupied by the Nazis at the time the film was made) led by Mendez (Garry Marsh) which has just lost its ukulele player, who got shot. He's called for a replacement, too. As you can guess, George gets separated from his band and winds up on the ship to Bergen with the liaisons thinking George is the other ukulele player.

This is a bit of a problem: Mendez is actually working with the Nazis, somehow using his radio broadcasts to send coded messages to the U-boat commanders who then use that code to torpedo British shipping in the North Sea that would otherwise bring vital supplies to Britain. (Obviously, the filmmakers didn't know about the Enigma cipher.) When George gets to Bergen, he's met by hotel desk clerk Mary (Phyllis Calvert), who is going to be George's contact with British intelligence. George doesn't know, of course, that he was brought in with the thinking that he was the spy for Britain, but once he finds out what's going on wth Mendez, he accepts the assignment because, after all, everybody has to do their duty.

Of course, George foils the Nazi plot, singing a couple of songs along the way and having a lot of comedic mishaps. Probably the most interesting is a dream sequence in which he balloons into a Nazi party congress and socks Hitler in the face. I can imagine the reaction that engendered in British audiences of the day. Watch also for a young Bernard Lee playing a boat passenger who gets into it with George both on the boat and then later at the hotel.

How much you like Let George Do It! will probably depend on how much you like Formby's brand of comedy and his musical stylings. Neither are quite my thing, although that doesn't mean I'm saying I didn't like the movie. It's more that people who do like those aspects will like the movie even more. It's certainly an interesting look at an aspect of World War II that we in America don't get much of a look at, that being the contemporary view of the British home from from their own perspective. There's a lot of stuff from after the war, and some vintage Hollywood stuff, but the British stuff doesn't show up all that much here.

The DVD was released by Reel Vault, which as far as I can tell is putting out bare-bones DVDs that may be gray market, but aren't getting a release anywhere else in the US. (I've mentioned them before with It Always Rains on Sunday and a couple of others.) When I checked over the weekend it was available on the TCM Shop even though I could swear when I had checked some other times it wasn't. I did a search for Reel Vault and found some other places selling the DVD too, which had different cover art from what the TCM Shop shows. So take that as a precaution.