It’s That Man Again *** (1943, Tommy Handley, Greta Gynt, Jack Train) – Classic Movie Review 10,889

Director Walter Forde’s cheerful 1943 British black and white wartime comedy It’s That Man Again is the film of the anarchic radio show by Ted Kavanagh, and stars Tommy Handley, Jack Train and Greta Gynt. Based on an extraordinary broadcasting comedy hit – ‘the radio sensation with 20 million listeners’ – the film now has the appeal of an album of faded old photographs.

The immensely popular ITMA radio comedy show with Handley and Train kept the nation laughing through the dark years of World War Two and was tremendously important to British national morale. Alas, as tastes in humour have changed so radically, this film version has dated badly and it may not seem at all funny to younger generations as it so obviously did in 1943. But for those old enough to remember and for nostalgia buffs, it is a nostalgic wallow in oddball characters and offbeat antique wisecracks.

The once attractive detailed topicality of its humour has prevented it from wearing well as comedy but ITMA has an Antiques Roadshow kind of fascination now. Even while the radio show was still running, its producer Francis Worsley said that recordings of earlier series seemed curiously dusty and faded, like an album of old photographs. And that is the nature of the film too.

Liverpool-born comedian Handley plays the fast-talking, devious and disreputable mayor of Foaming-at-the-Mouth, whose small town population are foaming because he has gambled all the council’s cash and won a London local theatre that has been bombed. Handley steals the rights to a new play from a tipsy writer, and stages the play to save the financial situation. But on its opening night, the local student members of the theatre’s drama academy he has cheated arrive and spoil the show.

Once a household name in Britain, Tommy Handley is now more or less forgotten.

The screenplay is by Howard Irving Young and Ted Kavanagh. Kavanagh wrote a script for a comedy sketch for Handley in 1926, starting a professional relationship that lasted until Handley’s death in 1949.

Also in the cast are Greta Gynt as Stella Ferris, Jack Train as nervous gangster Lefty/ incompetent German agent Funf, Sydney Keith as Sam Scram, Horace Percival as Alley-Oop/ Cecil, Claude Bailey as C B Cato, Franklyn Bennett as Hilary Craven, Vera Frances as Daisy, Dino Galvani as Signor Soso, Jean Kent as Kitty, Leonard Sharp as Claude, Dorothy Summers as Mrs Mopp (‘Can I do you now, sir?’), Clarence Wright as Clarence, Richard George as Uncle Percy, Raymond Glendenning, and Peter Noble.

The BBC radio comedy programme It’s That Man Again (ITMA) ran over 12 series from 1939 to 1949. When Handley died during the twelfth series, the remaining programmes were cancelled. The 310th final edition of ITMA was recorded on 5 January 1949 and four days later Handley died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged 56.

Initial plans were to call the show MUG or the Ministry of Universal Gratification but producer Worsley preferred ITMA or It’s That Man Again, which referred to Hitler.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 10,889

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