The Gay Dog

Harmony Lane

Lilacs in the Spring

One Good Turn

June

The year was half through before cinemagoers caught a glimpse of a British musical film. Some made do with Wilfred Pickles and Megs Jenkins repeating their husband-and-wife partnership in the Piccadilly Theatre stage production of 1952 in Coronet Films’ warm-hearted The Gay Dog. Not surprisingly, Pickles (a superb but consistently under-rated actor) won MFB’s praise for ‘an interesting character study of a hard-working miner, whilst retaining his customary mannerisms’. The musical titbit was Joe (Mr Piano) Henderson’s ‘A Long Way to Go’, sung by Petula Clark. Modest fare in a year lacking distinction, the best the British musical film could come up with was a patched-together half-hour musical revue, a supposedly lush theatrical romance based on the West End Anna Neagle vehicle The Glorious Years, and more Norman Wisdom.

October

Small but neatly proportioned, Harmony Lane is a curiosity worth exploring. Presented by Daniel M. Angel, produced by Morris Talbot, and directed by Lewis Gilbert (holidaying as Byron Gill), this miniature revue was made in 3D at Gate Studios, Boreham Wood. Visually, it’s a delight. The cartoonish design by Michael Stringer is tasteful and inventive, even beautiful when it presents its ballet segment, with the various ‘turns’ enacted in Harmony Lane’s shops, linked by a prancing policeman (Jack Billings). The Television Toppers welcome us with Billings’s neatly choreographed street dancing before lining up for their expected high-kicking routine, complete with performing dog. We see a snatch of The Skating Sayers before the Jack Billings Trio’s spanking tap number invigorates the display; these dancers are at the top of their game. Another notable ‘spesh’ artist, Jack Kelly, dazzles with some complex juggling, although the most impressive feat of his stage act (throwing a lighted cigarette up from his heels and catching it in his mouth) is missing. Gilbert sensibly moves the various segments on before we grow weary of them.

The friendly local bobby turns to the ‘Ballet Shoes’ shop for the central sequence of the picture. A young woman (Svetlana Beriosova, soon to be prima ballerina of Sadler’s Wells) is trying on the stock, helped by the shopkeeper (David Paltenghi). As he turns away to the window, she steps through a curtain.