London Town

London Town (1946)

Veteran music-hall entertainer Jerry Stanford a washed-up comedian hopes to stage a comeback in a glittering new revue. Alas, Stanford is hired as merely an understudy and bit player. His faithful daughter pulls a few fast ones in order to get her dad back on stage in a starring role....

Date of release
1946-09-30
TMDB
10.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
2h 6m
Genres
Comedy, Music
Director
Wesley Ruggles

Casting

Interesting facts

London Town is a 1946 Technicolor musical film directed by Wesley Ruggles and starring Sid Field and Petula Clark. The screenplay was by Sig Herzig, Val Guest, and Elliot Paul, based on a story by Ruggles.

Production

Financed by the Rank Organisation at a time of rationing and shortages of materials in the period immediately after World War II, it was filmed in the shell of "Sound City Shepperton", which had been made available as a film studio after being requisitioned during the war as a factory for aircraft parts.

Music Hall performer Field had cheered up wartime London audiences with his hugely successful stage variety shows, including Strike a New Note (1943), Strike it Again (1944), and Piccadilly Hayride (1946), so he seemed a natural for the lead. As he was of the opinion that no British director was capable of making a good musical, he insisted on having an American at the helm, and the task fell to Wesley Ruggles, who produced as well.

Val Guest said he did not write the script, but he "did a script of all Sid's stuff" because they had worked together on stage. He continued, "Wes Ruggles needed somebody firm on top of him and he didn’t have anybody. I think they were overawed by his “weight” [gravitas] because his biography read like movie history. It just didn’t hang together, it was a very bad script".

Kay Kendall was promoted as England's answer to Lana Turner. "Nobody had ever heard of me but they called me a star", she later recalled. "I opened bazaars, signed autographs, went to premieres, [and] did everything a star was supposed to do. My photograph was on magazine covers and front pages of newspapers. And all before we'd ever finished the picture."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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