by Stephen Vagg
A 1938 George Wallace comedy
We’ve previously written a piece in this series on George Wallace, the comic singer/dancer/writer/actor who was one of the biggest stars in Australian vaudeville through the 1920s and 1930s.
As mentioned in that essay, in the 1930s, Wallace made three features and a number of short films for FW Thring, as well as being in one film that started shooting but was abandoned (Sheepmates), and another that was in pre-production only to be cancelled when Thring died in 1936 (Collits’ Inn).
Wallace then made two movies for Ken G Hall at Cinesound: Gone to the Dogs and Let George Do It, which we’re discussing today.
Copies of both movies survive at the National Film and Sound Archive. Unfortunately, the available version of Let George Do It only lasts for 50 minutes – we’ve read that the original went for 79 minutes which means that a fair chunk is missing, and it was far less satisfying to watch than Gone to the Dogs – which, while also heavily cut, at least made it to the full hour. Still, there were lots of fun elements.
Let George Do It casts Wallace as a bungling stage assistant, who suffers a series of knockbacks and decides to commit suicide. He can’t bring himself to do it himself, so he hires a hitman to kill him in exchange for the hitman inheriting Wallace’s estate… but then Wallace inherits a fortune, wants to live, and has to stop the hitman, who is after that money.
If this story (credited to Hall’s mate, publicity director Hal Carleton) sounds familiar, you might have read it in Jules Verne’s novel Tribulations of a Chinaman in China or seen it in films like Flirting with Fate (1916) with Douglas Fairbanks, Love, Honor, and Oh Baby! (1940), The Whistler (1944), Up to his Ears (1965) with Jean-Paul Belmondo, The Odd Job (1978) (aka the film Graham Chapman starred in that everyone forgets exists), Tulips (1981), Bulworth (1998) and… oh, lots of films. Suicide-hitmen comedy never dates, we guess.
Let George Do It showcases Wallace well – not surprising, considering that he co-wrote the script (Wallace authored many of his stage shows). Hall’s regular writer, Frank Harvey, also worked on the movie, though it’s hard to gauge his exact contribution, especially from the 50-minute version, which comprises mostly of musical numbers (on stage, in a pub) and comic set pieces, that one imagines were primarily constructed by Wallace and Cinesound’s uncredited team of gag writers: Wallace ruining the stage act of a magician (Alec Kellaway), Wallace on a bender with his mate (Joe Valli), Wallace having a wrestling match with a gangster (George Lloyd), Wallace and his girl (Letty Craydon) being pursued by gangsters across Sydney Harbour where Ken Hall really gets his money’s worth out of some back projection equipment.
There are glimpses of other storylines that appear to have been completely dispensed with. For instance, Gwen Munro pops up at the beginning and end as Molly, some girl who Wallace adores, but barely does anything in the film; ditto Neil Carlton, who plays Munro’s love interest who Wallace seems to know somehow. A plotline about Wallace becoming a stage star is set up, then thrown away. Characters are established as important (Kellaway’s magician, Jack Settle’s stage manager), then never seen again.
This makes watching Let George Do It a frustrating experience. Nonetheless, it’s still technically impressive (cinematography, sets, etc), and one can appreciate the comedy and the skill of the set pieces, especially the boat chase (which includes location work on Sydney Harbour) and the wrestling sequence between Wallace and Lloyd. Some of the comedy is fascinatingly dark, with Wallace trying to kill himself by purchasing poison and getting Joe Valli to push him in front of a car. We also like the fact that even though it’s a George Wallace movie, and Wallace co-wrote it, the star is surrounded by other very funny comic actors (Craydon, Lloyd, Valli), who all get a chance to shine.
And of course, there is the fact that comedies can say things about a culture other genres can’t – thus, you can discover a lot about 1930s Australia in Let George Do It for all its songs, gags and truncated running time: the depiction of seedy working class pubs; a society that is riddled in class divisions, and where the only way to go from poverty to wealth is to inherit money; a sense of hopelessness only survivable through mateship. In its way, Let George Do It remains an invaluable piece of Australian art.
The author would like to thank Graham Shirley and the National Film and Sound Archive for their assistance with this piece. Unless otherwise mentioned, all opinions are the author’s
