An Alligator Named Daisy

Peter Weston is engaged to Vanessa Colebrook, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. On a journey home on a steamer he meets an old sea hand who shares with him how his wife won't let him keep his pet Daisy anymore. Weston offers him a kind ear and the sailor takes him for a kind man. When Weston wakes up later in the journey he finds that the sailor has left Daisy in his care. The problem is that Daisy is a middle sized alligator. Whilst trying to throw the beast overboard, he meets Moira who helps him out. He is desperate to see her again and uses the alligator as an excuse – however keeping a girlfriend, an alligator and a fiancée are not all easy tasks to carry out simultaneously.

I was attracted to this film by the title as much as anything else. The film is amiable enough but doesn't seem to know what it wants to be – is it a musical or is it a comedy or is it a romance? The musical section has some nice moments but really lacks a push in terms of choreography. Also some of the songs are a little lacklustre. One of the better songs is sung in a garage and 6 red oil drums seem to sit immobile in the foreground – not used in any meaningful way, but just sitting there, seemed rather pointless to me. The comedy aspect is OK but it is rarely laugh out loud funny. It is good enough to keep you with a weird half-smile on your face for half the time but not much more than that. There are some nice touches but nothing that'll have you rolling – most of it involves an alligator being where you don't expect it to be.

The romance aspect didn't work for me because of the fact Weston was making woo at someone else while he was engaged to someone else. While Moira did her bit, I found Weston himself to be a bit stale and certainly not likeable enough to get past the whole cheating issue.

In that regard, the very young looking Donald Sinden was maybe not the best choice for the lead although he does alright in some bits he just needed more charisma. Carson is a bubbly redhead and brings her bits to life, by comparison Dors is very beautiful but a lot less fun to have onscreen. The support cast are all quite amusing and there are some (very brief) cameos near the end from Nicholas Parsons and Frankie Howerd. Daisy herself is quite wooden – or rather rubbery – for the whole film. For longer scenes where she is needed in the shot it is laughably evident that this thing has just been placed in position and left there!

Overall this is an average film that is worth seeing because it is quite charming in a very dated way. The main problem will be that it doesn't totally deliver on any one of the three genres that it tries to cover and ends up falling short of them all.