WWII
comedy “Don’t Panic, Chaps!” (1959) is another one of my favourite
B-movie gems for your rainy Sunday consideration (even when it isn’t
rainy, or Sunday), centring around British troops forced to station
themselves at a remote Adriatic island to discover separated German
troops have already set up base there. The stranded men soon declare a
truce so they can all enjoy the warm temptations of a peaceful
Mediterranean hideaway, until the newest arrival - in the singularly
womanly shape of Nadja Regin - threatens to interrupt their shared
peace.
It’s a simple premise with familiar comic tension and the movie is very gentle, awkward even, in its dialogue, physical humour, pacing, everything. But it’s great fun for several reasons: first is the great cast (Thorley Walters plays a sweetly blustery, mostly sensible Captain heading the English camp with George Cole, Harry Fowler, and Percy Herbert, and Dennis Price plays a marvellously clipped continental captain to the German camp with George Murcell, Gertan Klauber, and Thomas Foulkes), each one a kind of schoolboy comic caricature playing off one another. Second is that same predictable plot is welcome and refreshing in a war context, an overtly pacifist narrative as the enemy is nowhere to be found, nor does anyone care for the longest time (my favourite combat/service comedy trope of all). Left to sit out the war and seek the attentions of neutral, foreign Elsa, the men defend their little island paradise and concurrently work together or apart, not for the Fatherland or Blighty, but for a little friendship and romance Xo
It’s a simple premise with familiar comic tension and the movie is very gentle, awkward even, in its dialogue, physical humour, pacing, everything. But it’s great fun for several reasons: first is the great cast (Thorley Walters plays a sweetly blustery, mostly sensible Captain heading the English camp with George Cole, Harry Fowler, and Percy Herbert, and Dennis Price plays a marvellously clipped continental captain to the German camp with George Murcell, Gertan Klauber, and Thomas Foulkes), each one a kind of schoolboy comic caricature playing off one another. Second is that same predictable plot is welcome and refreshing in a war context, an overtly pacifist narrative as the enemy is nowhere to be found, nor does anyone care for the longest time (my favourite combat/service comedy trope of all). Left to sit out the war and seek the attentions of neutral, foreign Elsa, the men defend their little island paradise and concurrently work together or apart, not for the Fatherland or Blighty, but for a little friendship and romance Xo
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