WHERE'S CHARLEY?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 716, 2 April 1953, Page 14

WHERE'S CHARLEY?

| (Warner Bros.) UST about ninety per cent of J the fun in this polished musical version of Charley’s Aunt comes from the performance in the principal role of Ray Bolger, the _comic dancer who pranced his way to fame as the Straw Man in The Wizard of Oz. As Charley, the Oxford undergraduate who impersonates his rich aunt from Brazil for a single hectic | afternoon, he successfully bamboozles two middle-aged suitors who are after his aunt’s millions, as well as solving. the more romantic matrimonial problems of himself and his room-mate with their respective young ladies. David Butler, the director, has based his film on the Broadway musiagl comedy of 1948, and the action of the familiar old story is interspers¥d with | half a dozen song and dance numbers by the two men and their girl friends, with a chorus of assorted undergraduates. These musical routines are occasionally tedious insofar as they inter: rupt the hilarious flight of Charley’s impersonation, but singe they are staged with the spontaneous gaiety which we have come to associate with better musicals like On the Town or An American in Paris, they are well worth looking at for. their own sake..There is also, following the example of the two films just mentioned, a fairly long, wordless ballet sequence near the end, in which Charley and his girl friend (played by Allyn McLerie) imagine they are -in South America, pursued by a gang of SpanishIndian cut-throats, This exotic masquerade is played with just the right air of burlesquing a real ballet to keep it in tune with the farcical spirit of the rest of the film. The story relates ew Charley and his friend have invited their girls up to their room in one of the university town’s ivy-covered colleges. Since. the time is about the turn of the century the girls are required to have a chaperone for the visit-and this was to be the role of Charley’s aunt, who, unfortunately, misses the train from London, Charley manages to soothe the misgivings of the girls by dressing up in a long black dress and a wig and pretending to be the old lady. But when the girls’ Uncle Spettigue unexpectedly arrives the affair becomes complicated. Charley not only successfully deceives the fierce uncle. He also becomes involved in a hilarious wooing match with him that leads up and down the garden paths, through the cloisters and over the. walls, when Spettigue (who "just loves money") feels the urge to take a-wife. The further _arrival of the father of Charley’s room-mate, with similar ideas. and later of the real Dona Lucia d’Alvadorez (Charley’s aunt) gets Charley into such a giddy spin that his unfrocking ‘becomes obviously only a matter of time, It takes place at a ball that ‘evening, but \not before Charley has persuaded Spettigue to consent to the marriage of himself and his room-mate to the two girls. Horace Cooper is first-rate as Spettigue, and Robert Shackleton is agreeable as Charley’s room-mate. The. film / uses a number: of actual Oxford settings. and is all in all a reat and happy piece of work.