I have concluded that watching Old Mother Riley movies, like eating live frogs, should best be done first thing in the morning, to ensure that nothing worse will happen in your day. Unfortunately, by the time I noticed the availability for viewing of this movie, I had been up for some time, and it clashed with my dictum of getting unpleasant tasks out of the way as soon as possible.
In this one, Lancashire lad Arthur Lucan, who impersonated Old Mother Riley in drag, with his wife, Kitty McShane, playing his daughter, gets involved in tracking down black marketeers, His Majesty's police and spies being unable to do it on their own. There was clearly some money spent on this movie. Miss McShane introduces two songs, and there is a goodly amount of location shooting. Nonetheless the usual process shots, looping and other means of keeping production costs down are both obvious and destructive of any comedy.
It is true that the Old Mother Riley movies were enormously popular. Lucan had been voted the second most popular British screen personality in 1941, and he would appear as the character 17 times on the screen, with another movie planned when he collapsed on stage and died. Nonetheless, even with my old-fashioned taste for slapstick, I find the character, series and this movie irritating. The character screeches, and never ceases her stream of malapropisms; there is nothing to put me on the character's side except the writer-mandated inevitable success. The routine may have once been popular, but its time has long gone, and the lack of anything worthwhile in this film other than that outdated shtick should consign it to the trash heap.
