Clifford Evans is an industrial foreman sent to France in 1940 to retrieve three "special-purpose machines" before the invading Germans can get their hands on them. He has nothing but trouble getting the job done.
If you enjoyed Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" you ought to enjoy this because it's a similar combination of serious themes -- adventure, mystery, intrigue, death -- overlain with a thick impasto of comedy.
Essentially it's a "journey" film. Evans commandeers a truck manned by two lost British soldiers -- Tommy Trinder and an impossibly young Gordon Jackson. In fact there are quite a few familiar figures in the cast, including Mervyn Johns, Francis L. Sullivan, and John Williams. All are in minor roles. Williams is a Fifth Columnist masquerading as a British officer, but it's hard to imagine him as anything other than a detective or some kind of investigator. There are nights when I lull myself to sleep trying to list his many investigators and policemen.
Anyway, the truck with its load of precious machines makes its way through the byways of a France that is rapidly being overrun by the German army. Evans and the soldiers pick up a pretty blond American girl. (There must always be an attractive young lady around.) Next in line, of course, is a nun with a dozen children. The first little kid they hoist aboard has to pee. Nothing but tribulations.
It's enlivened, if that's the word, by some of the wisecracks of the light-hearted and optimistic Tommy Trinder. "You know what Nelson said -- England expects. That's why they call it the Mother Country." And, "You can take a horse to water but a pencil must be lead." Actually, now that I mull that over a bit, it's pretty funny.
The frolic is interrupted by the nasty Nazis who bomb hospitals and strafe roads filled with refugees. The refugees wind up dead, too, though not lingered over. Little of the horror is lingered over. It's not that kind of movie, any more than "The Lady Vanishes" was.
You know, what's most surprising about the movie is not that it's pretty good, which it is, including its special effects, but that it was made at all.
After all, this was released in 1942, a bad year for the Allies. Britain in particular was suffering. The Yanks had just been swept up in the war and not yet effectively mobilized. Cities like London and Coventry were bombed in a way that New York and Baltimore never were. Rommel was doing fine in North Africa. England was being strangled by U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. Russia was reeling. And here, under the most stringent conditions, a jolly good movie is produced and released.
An admirable job, considering. Ealing wasn't the studio producing splendid comedies that it was to become, but it's impossible to complain about "The Foreman Went to France." It would be an enjoyable divertissement under any circumstances.
If you enjoyed Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" you ought to enjoy this because it's a similar combination of serious themes -- adventure, mystery, intrigue, death -- overlain with a thick impasto of comedy.
Essentially it's a "journey" film. Evans commandeers a truck manned by two lost British soldiers -- Tommy Trinder and an impossibly young Gordon Jackson. In fact there are quite a few familiar figures in the cast, including Mervyn Johns, Francis L. Sullivan, and John Williams. All are in minor roles. Williams is a Fifth Columnist masquerading as a British officer, but it's hard to imagine him as anything other than a detective or some kind of investigator. There are nights when I lull myself to sleep trying to list his many investigators and policemen.
Anyway, the truck with its load of precious machines makes its way through the byways of a France that is rapidly being overrun by the German army. Evans and the soldiers pick up a pretty blond American girl. (There must always be an attractive young lady around.) Next in line, of course, is a nun with a dozen children. The first little kid they hoist aboard has to pee. Nothing but tribulations.
It's enlivened, if that's the word, by some of the wisecracks of the light-hearted and optimistic Tommy Trinder. "You know what Nelson said -- England expects. That's why they call it the Mother Country." And, "You can take a horse to water but a pencil must be lead." Actually, now that I mull that over a bit, it's pretty funny.
The frolic is interrupted by the nasty Nazis who bomb hospitals and strafe roads filled with refugees. The refugees wind up dead, too, though not lingered over. Little of the horror is lingered over. It's not that kind of movie, any more than "The Lady Vanishes" was.
You know, what's most surprising about the movie is not that it's pretty good, which it is, including its special effects, but that it was made at all.
After all, this was released in 1942, a bad year for the Allies. Britain in particular was suffering. The Yanks had just been swept up in the war and not yet effectively mobilized. Cities like London and Coventry were bombed in a way that New York and Baltimore never were. Rommel was doing fine in North Africa. England was being strangled by U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. Russia was reeling. And here, under the most stringent conditions, a jolly good movie is produced and released.
An admirable job, considering. Ealing wasn't the studio producing splendid comedies that it was to become, but it's impossible to complain about "The Foreman Went to France." It would be an enjoyable divertissement under any circumstances.