Sarai il mio amore

The credit reads "Introducing Michael Rennie" in his eighteenth movie. He and Peter Graves -- the English one, not the American one -- simultaneously come up with the idea of fighting the pirate music publishers at the turn of the 20th Century, by matching their sixpenny prices for sheet music, and courting a singing Margaret Lockwood. Her singing is done by Maudie Edwards. The pirates, led by Garry Marsh, drop their prices to tuppence, while debates on enforcing copyright go on in Parliament and Moore Marriott as songwriter George Le Brunn dies in poverty, leaving widow Muriel George an estate of less than two pounds.

This Gainsborough musical, directed and co-written by Valentine Guest, reminds me a great deal of the nostalgic Betty Grable musicals of the period. True, it's black & white. True, there are only a couple of songs by Le Brunn, and three more by his contemporaries, with a further three supplied by Guest and a collaborator. Still it fits neatly into the genre, with some good, if stagebound choreography and a great sequence set in contemporary Blackpool.

Miss Lockwood gets top billing, followed by Vic Oliver, in what I think of as the Jack Oakie role, to Rennie's John Payne and Miss Lockwood's Grable. It was Oliver's last feature film, released the year his marriage with Sarah Churchill ended. Although I am not as familiar with the music-hall tunes of the era as their American contemporaries, there is obviously a great deal of fondness for them in this movie, giving it a patina of sincerity that is very pleasant.