Princess Charming

As a princess escaping from revolutionaries, in disguise and married to the handsome captain of the guard (although already promised to a neighbouring ruler), Laye finds her singing brutally curtailed by a bunch of ersatz Bolsheviks and Max Miller's machine-gun humour. Elvey's direction is, to say the least, erratic; but the Gainsborough emphasis on speed and economy prevents the film from plunging into embarrassing longueurs. Continuity and plot plausibility become increasingly irrelevant as Miller indelicately tramples upon the conventions of Ruritanian musical romance, in the end galvanising the rest of the cast enough to transform the film into a gloriously funny pantomime.