Orders Are Orders ** (1954, Peter Sellers, Sidney James, Tony Hancock, Brian Reece, Margot Grahame, Raymond Huntley, June Thorburn) – Classic Movie Review 9087

Director David Paltenghi’s 1954 comedy Orders Are Orders is an engagingly cast (and grammatically correct) though iffily handled retread of Walter Forde’s vintage Orders Is Orders (1933), with a British army base driven to distraction by the appearance of an American film company making a sci-fi flick.

The soldiers relentlessly pursue the movie-crew women, but then the commander arrives to inspect the base, expelling the Yanks to a neighbouring spook house.

Though based on an antique play by Ian Hay and Anthony Armstrong, this very broad and roughly hewn comedy is very much of its Fifties time, and the script by Donald Taylor, Geoffrey Orme and Eric Sykes is not tittersome or tight enough to do the great British comic players justice, though Peter Sellers, Sidney James and Tony Hancock make their mark and win their laughs.

Also in the cast are Brian Reece, Margot Grahame, Raymond Huntley, Maureen Swanson, June Thorburn, Bill Fraser, Donald Pleasence, Peter Martyn, Edward Lexy, Eric Sykes, Barry MacKay [Barry McKay], Clive Morton, Michael Trubshawe, Reginald Hearne, Barry Steele, Maureen Pryor, Mark Baker, Stephen Vercoe, Leonard Williams, Peter Haigh, David Green and Gerald Campion (aka Billy Bunter).

Sellers, Hancock and James share a single brief shot together in a scene inside a gym. Sellers has a small role as bar steward Private Goffin, Hancock (with an ‘and introducing’ credit) plays Lieutenant Cartroad the officer charge of the army band, and James plays the American film director Ed Waggermeyer.

It runs only 78 minutes and was shot in black and white at Beaconsfield Studios, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England.

Appearing together here for the first time, Hancock and James of course went on to be one of the great double acts on British radio and TV in Hancock’s Half Hour. It is also Eric Sykes’s first feature.

Brian Reece was famed as PC 49 in the hit late 1940s radio series, and in the films The Adventures of PC 49 (1949) and A Case for PC 49 (1951). He died of bone disease in 1962, aged 48.

June Thorburn was killed in a plane crash at the age of 36, while returning to London from Spain.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 9087

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com