Crook’s Tour *** (1941, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, Greta Gynt) – Classic Movie Review 4696

The endearing Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne return for the third time in their quintessential Englishmen abroad guise as cricket-mad Charters and Caldicott (after The Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich) in director John Baxter’s lively and often funny 1941 black and white British spy comedy-drama film Crook’s Tour.

The wartime story is about the Nazis thinking that Charters and Caldicott are spies while they are on holiday in Baghdad, touring the Middle East with fellow Britons. And so, by mistake, the Germans give them a record with vital information for the enemy. Their names are shown entered in a hotel register as Hawtrey Charters and Sinclair Caldicott.

Greta Gynt (born Margrethe Woxholt; 15 November 1916 – 2 April 2000).

Crook’s Tour is quite tattily made and weakly scripted, certainly if you compare it with Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. But are hugely entertaing, and the amusingly daft po-faced performances keep it fun and alive. Greta Gynt glows as La Palermo, the glamorous nightclub singer femme fatale and double agent.

John Watt and Max Kester’s original story and screenplay are based on Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s BBC radio serial Crook’s Tour.

Also in the cast are Abraham Sofaer, Gordon McLeod, Charles Oliver, Bernard Rebel, Cyril Gardiner, Noel Hood, Morris Harvey, Billy Shine and Peter Gawthorne.

Radford and Wayne returned once more as Charters and Caldicott in Millions Like Us, their last screen billing.

However, sadly, there was a falling out. They were to reappear in I See a Dark Stranger (1946), but Launder and Gilliat refused to give them the larger roles they wanted, so they were replaced by two similar but differently named characters. Radford and Wayne were contractually disallowed from playing Charters and Caldicott, but they continued playing similar double acts in more movies, such as Dead of Night (1945, sequence directed by Charles Crichton), A Girl in a Million (1946, Francis Searle) and Quartet (1948, sequence directed by Ralph Smart). Another recurring cricket-mad pairing played by them were Bright and Early in It’s Not Cricket (1949, Alfred Roome), as well as in Helter Skelter (1949, Ralph Thomas) and Stop Press Girl (1949, Michael Barry).

Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as Charters and Caldicott in Night Train to Munich..

Radford and Wayne’s four official Charters and Caldicott film appearances are in The Lady Vanishes (1938), Night Train to Munich (1940), Crook’s Tour (1941), and Millions Like Us (1943).

But they also appeared in The Next of Kin (1942) as careless talkers on train, Dead of Night (1945) as Parratt and Potter, A Girl in a Million (1946) as Prendergast and Fotheringham, Quartet (1948) as Garnet and Leslie, It’s Not Cricket (1949) as Bright and Early, Passport to Pimlico (1949) as Gregg and Straker, unnamed in Helter Skelter (1949), and Stop Press Girl (1949) as The Mechanical Types.

Radford and Wayne also appeared as Charters and Caldicott in two BBC radio serials, Crook’s Tour (1942, remade as the film) and Secret Mission 609 (1942).

Radford and Wayne appeared in various guises on radio with their Charters and Caldicott-style characters renamed for rights reasons. Their self-contained eight-part radio series, made roughly annually, were very popular on BBC radio and they starred as Woolcott and Spencer in Double Bedlam (1946) and Traveller’s Joy (1947), as Berkeley and Bulstrode in Crime Gentleman, Please (1948), as Hargreaves and Hunter in Having a Wonderful Crime (1949), as Fanshaw and Fothergill in That’s My Baby (1950), and as Straker and Gregg, their characters in Passport to Pimlico, in May I Have The Treasure (1951) and Rogue’s Gallery (1952). But Radford died suddenly of a heart attack at 55 in mid-production on Rogue’s Gallery, with Wayne left alone to complete the programme.

Crook’s Tour is directed by John Baxter, runs 80 minutes, is distributed by Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors, is written by Barbara K Emary, Max Kester and John Watt, based on Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s BBC radio serial Crook’s Tour, is shot in black and white by James Wilson, is produced by John Corfield, and is scored by Kennedy Russell.

Release date 24 May 1941 (US).

The cast are Basil Radford as Charters, Naunton Wayne as Caldicott, Greta Gynt as La Palermo, Charles Oliver as Sheik, Gordon McLeod as Rossenger, Abraham Sofaer as Ali, Bernard Rebel as Klacken, Cyril Gardiner as K7, Leo de Pokorny as Hotel Manager, Morris Harvey as Waiter, Noel Hood as Edith Charters, Finlay Currie as Tourist, Andreas Malandrinos as Nightclub Manager, Patricia Medina as Hotel Receptionist, Jack Melford as Tour Guide, Bernard Rebel, Billy Shine and Peter Gawthorne.

The film is on The Lady Vanishes Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4696

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