1956 British film by Val Guest
It's a Wonderful World is a 1956 British musical film directed and written by Val Guest and starring Terence Morgan, George Cole, Mylène Demongeot (in her first English-language film and listed in the credits as Mylène Nicole) and Kathleen Harrison.[1] It also features Dennis Lotis, a popular singer at the time.
Plot
In London, Ray and Ken are two struggling composers of popular songs, and they make friends with a young French singer, Georgie, newly arrived from Paris. She likes one of the songs Ray and Ken have written, and chooses to sing it when she gets an audition with bandleader Ted Heath, and she is hired as their singer. Unaware of this, Ken stumbles across another route to success when his broken record player plays his records backwards, and he uses a tape recorder to create a piece of music by playing the recording tape backwards, which he thinks sounds similar to a newly successful kind of music. He attributes the music to a fictitious avant garde composer, Rimsikoff, living abroad, and when the music is performed at a concert, most of the public and critics are duped. Georgie discovers what they are doing and warns them off, and when they learn of her success with their song, they decide Rimsikoff will 'retire'.
Cast
Production
It was made at Shepperton Studios.[2] Val Guest said "That was quite an experience. It featured the band and the people in it. That was a musical, I wrote the numbers, Ted Heath wrote some, I wrote some of the point numbers. We did it between us... That was originally, by the way, called It’s a Great Life... but then we found there’s an American film called that so I changed it to It’s a Wonderful World."[3]
Songs
Songs include: "Rosanne", "When You Came Along", "Girls! Girls! Girls!" (Ted Heath, Moira Heath), "A Few Kisses Ago" (Robert Farnon, Val Guest), and "The Hawaiian War Chant" (Ted Heath).[4]
Critical reception
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "A somewhat cheerless comedy liberally laced with sob and swing numbers. The script relentlessly tracks down every particle of humour to be wrung from comic landladies, teenage crooner fans, arty music critics and the general inanities of Tin Pan Alley. Ted Heath and his Music perform with drive and authority."[5]
Allmovie wrote: "director Val Guest manages to extract new laughs out of such old setpieces as showing a snobbish audience being gradually won over by pop music. The principal attraction of It's a Wonderful World – to modern viewers, at least – is the presence of Ted Heath, whose screen appearances were rare."[6]
References
External links
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