I can see that Frank Randle might have been funny on stage for a fifteen-minute music hall turn, e.g. the bath routine; but his brand of frenetic clumsy comedy gets very tedious when stretched out over the length of a whole film. And this isn't a terribly good film in any case -- you have the inane young lovers (so far as I can gather, the unlikeable girl discovers that she is adopted and assumes for some reason that this means she is not eligible to inherit her adoptive parents' money, thus causing her apparently not only to refuse to marry the uninteresting young man but to refuse to explain why, via the most infuriating set of clichés in the script-writer's repertoire: "Let's just go on as we are, as really grand friends") who struggle with poor dialogue and threadbare motivations, and then you have Randle and friends as the comic relief, with no plot function at all. The so-called comic relief, that is...
In the world of "Somewhere on Leave", the whole business of the war seemingly exists only to to 'broaden' over-mothered young men, and to provide a supply of nubile females in uniform for a spot of matchmaking. Watching this film, I was reminded of 'Fatty' Arbuckle's supposed dictum that a comedian should never forget that the mental age of the audience is never more than 12 years old; I'd say that's more or less the age this picture is pitched to, and unfortunately it's no custard-pie slapstick event. As the TV set flickered, I could hear the ghost of audience laughter from an undemanding cigarette-smoke-filled auditorium, back in the Forties -- sadly, none of that laughter was mine. This is not my type of humour at all.
In the world of "Somewhere on Leave", the whole business of the war seemingly exists only to to 'broaden' over-mothered young men, and to provide a supply of nubile females in uniform for a spot of matchmaking. Watching this film, I was reminded of 'Fatty' Arbuckle's supposed dictum that a comedian should never forget that the mental age of the audience is never more than 12 years old; I'd say that's more or less the age this picture is pitched to, and unfortunately it's no custard-pie slapstick event. As the TV set flickered, I could hear the ghost of audience laughter from an undemanding cigarette-smoke-filled auditorium, back in the Forties -- sadly, none of that laughter was mine. This is not my type of humour at all.