Let George Do It (1938)

The plot concerns a man, Joe Blake, who works as a stage hand in a vaudeville theatre headlined by Mysto the magician. When he finds out that the girl he is in love with, Molly, is getting married, he gets drunk with his friend Happy Morgan and decides to commit suicide.

Date of release
1938-06-18
TMDB
9.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 19m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Ken G. Hall

Casting

Interesting facts

Let George Do It is a 1938 comedy starring popular stage comedian George Wallace. It was the first of two films Wallace made for Ken G. Hall at Cinesound Productions, the other one being Gone to the Dogs (1939). Hall later called Wallace "in my opinion, easily the best comedian that this country has produced."

Production

Stuart F. Doyle signed George Wallace to a contract with Cinesound in February 1937. It was originally announced that he would be making Gone to the Dogs, set against a background of greyhound racing. That turned out to be Wallace's second Cinesound movie; this was the first. Ken Hall later said:

Wallace... was a visual comic and easily, in my opinion, the best comedian that this country has produced. He was a pantomime comedian in the Chaplin tradition which belongs on the screen. He didn’t have to say the words, he could tell it all with a look, an expression or a movement. Wallace was a naturally funny man. No ‘funny’ make-up such as Mo [Roy Rene] used. Just himself.

As with most Cinesound comedies of the late 1930s, Hall employed a team of comedy writers to help with the script along with credited screenwriters Wallace and Frank Harvey. This consisted of Hall, cartoonist Jimmy Bancks, Bill Maloney and Hal Carleton. The story followed a formula developed in Wallace's Ticket in Tatts: "George is given a simple labourer's job... Quite innocently is fired...

We worked every detail out with the writers. But George would have something that he’d done in vaudeville and he’d show me. For instance, in Let George Do It he slides across the scene on the back of his neck — that was part of his vaudeville act. He said, “Can you use it?" and I said, “Of course we can fit it in”. So we had a scene writtenspecially for a comedy sequence - the first time in Australia — and we had a trio that sang in the bar.

The central idea - a man hiring a hitman to kill him then changing his mind - had been used in several other movies.

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