We should be very thankful to Julius Hagen at Twickenham Studios for giving us a record of the look and sound of one of the greatest ever British dance bands.Basically this is just a succession of musical numbers linked together by the flimsiest of stories.This film was shown by Channel 4 in the late eighties and i was lucky enough to record it.They even had to apologise for the state of the print as it is full of scratches and abrupt joins.However even this battered print cannot mask or disguise the sheer stylishness of the Hylton Orchestra.We are even shown excerpts from some of his tours.Dance Band music at the Paris Opera!The band only had about 4 years left as it was disbanded shortly after the outbreak of war.
Just to mention that this has now been shown on TPTV in an almost pristine print.
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malcolmgsw9 November 2008
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JoeytheBrit20 April 2020A shipping magnate invites Jack Hylton and his band to broadcast a series of radio shows from one of his liners as a publicity stunt. Peculiar British musical featuring a nondescript bandleader who looked and sounded as if he would have been more at home with his racing pigeons. There are some decent numbers, and June Clyde adds some much needed life, but it's filmed without flair or imagination.
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writers_reign10 August 2020With the advent of 'Sound' at the end of the 1920s studios on both sides of the Atlantic saw 'musicals' as a licence to print money and inevitably the public soon had their fill and Hollywood got the message and turned to other genres until 42nd Street reversed the trend. For once the UK failed to follow Hollywood and throughout the thirties it seemed that anyone who had ever blown into paper wrapped around a comb was wheeled out and placed in front of a camera. In some cases - Gracie Fields, Jack Hulbert, Cicely Courtnidge, George Formby - the performers made a half-decent fist of it, whilst others, like Jesse Matthews, the Crazy Gang, etc, had already established themselves in the theatre. Another group ripe for exploitation was top orchestras and it wasn't too long before listeners were able to put faces to names like Jack Jackson, Harry Roy, and, as here, Jack Hylton. If you ignore the script - we are, for example, asked to believe that the entire Hylton orchestra would embark on an international cruise aboard a vessel that would struggle to cross the Serpentine - there are a couple of catchy tunes to beguile a moment or two, otherwise it's pretty ho hum.