Maytime in Mayfair * (1949, Anna Neagle, Michael Wilding, Peter Graves) – Classic Movie Review 9454

Director Herbert Wilcox’s 1949 romantic musical Maytime in Mayfair is the empty-headed Technicolor sequel to the hugely successful 1948 Spring in Park Lane, though it sees the welcome return of Anna Neagle, Michael Wilding, Nicholas Phipps, Peter Graves and Tom Walls from the original. It is the fourth of six films pairing Neagle and Wilding between 1947 and 1952.

Anna Neagle stars as a society dress designer called Eileen Grahame, and Wilding plays Michael Gore-Brown the social-butterfly gadabout who inherits the top London Mayfair fashion salon she manages. Graves plays Darcy Davenport, who owns a rival company that is seeking to bankrupt Wilding’s salon. Wilding’s cousin then leaks his new design secrets to Graves, and Wilding thinks Neagle is the culprit and quits for France.

Maytime in Mayfair is a total flop. The comedy is unfunny, the bewildering story is annoyingly vacuous, the acting is strained and the songs are dull.

Still, it is harmless, it does look a treat in Technicolor, the fashion show at the climax is fun, and everyone seems awfully cheery.

Nicholas Phipps again writes the screenplay and gives himself a good role to play, as Sir Henry Hazelrigg.

It features a lavish fashion show by some leading UK designers, promoting the revolutionary New Look fashions. It reuses the concept of a fashion show depicting models springing from life-sized magazine covers, which was first used in Cover Girl (1944). Phipps’s plot about inheriting a posh but poor fashion house seems to borrows from the 1933 Broadway musical Roberta, filmed by RKO as Roberta in 1935.  Roberta and Maytime In Mayfair both end in a fashion show climax.

Also in the cast are Thora Hird, Michael Shepley, Max Kirby, Tom Walls Jr, Doris Rogers, Mona Washbourne, Desmond Walter-Ellis, Pat Clare, Trevor Denis, Monica Francis, David Gardiner, Sabina Gordon, Bob Hawes, Josephine Ingram, Pauline Johnson, Paddy Johnson, Pam Kail, Mignon O’Doherty, Alan Reid, Eugene Sivyer, Richard West, Cynthia Williams and Glen Alyn.

It is the last film role for Tom Walls, who plays the Inspector in this film. He died two and a half months after the film was released. Walls owned and trained the horse that won the 1932 Derby at Epsom Downs, April the Fifth, which is mentioned in this movie.

It was not quite as popular as its predecessor, but it was still the second most popular movie at the UK box office in 1949 after The Third Man (1949).

In the opening credits, novelist and playwright Michael Arlen (1895-1956) is said to have confounded Mayfair in 1920 and politician Sir Stafford Cripps is said to have dumbfounded Mayfair in 1948.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9454

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