Fred Godfrey Songs on Film

 

 

A number of Fred Godfrey’s songs have turned up on the silver screen over the years, sometimes in unexpected places. Bless ’Em All has been used numerous times in films set in World War Two, while other Godfrey songs have helped to evoke the Music Hall era. In only a couple of instances, for Max Miller and George Formby, was Godfrey commissioned to write songs for a particular film. Godfrey songs have the distinction of being heard in three films that either won or were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture: Cavalcade (1933, winner); Twelve O’Clock High (1949); and Atonement (2007).

A Yank In The RAF Guadalcanal Diary
Author’s collection.
Author’s collection.

Bless ’Em All (1940)

Fred Godfrey’s most popular success has been used on many soundtracks, usually to evoke the sing-along chumminess of wartime Britain. The first film to use the song seems to have been A Yank In The RAF (1941), starring Tyrone Power and Betty Grable, where it is heard as background music in the swank London nightclub where Power (the Yank in the RAF) goes looking for his former stateside girlfriend Grable.

The Canterville Ghost
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http://en.wikipedia.org

In Captains Of The Clouds (1942), a Technicolour film about hardy Canadian bush pilots going off to war and partly shot on location in Canada, James Cagney and Alan Hale sing and dance a spirited version of Bless ’Em All. Also in 1942, a very young Robert Stack and the rest of his squadron of “Polish” flyers sing Bless ’Em All around a piano on their English airfield in Ernst Lubitch’s To Be Or Not To Be, starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard. Bless ’Em All also appears in the 1944 film version of the Oscar Wilde short story The Canterville Ghost, starring Charles Laughton as the Ghost, and Robert Young, Margaret O'Brien, and Reginald Owen.

Bless ’Em All was also used in two wartime films about the US Marines, who adopted the song as their unofficial anthem. In Guadalcanal Diary (1943), starring Lloyd Nolan, William Bendix, and Anthony Quinn, Bendix and other Marines sing it while digging a gun pit on that infamous island — unusually, they sing the British lyrics. And in Marine Raiders (1944), the song is used as a recurring theme in the scenes set in Australia — at one point, stars Pat O’Brien and Robert Ryan sing it in a Melbourne club. A wartime documentary entitled Tunisian Victory (1944), co-directed by Frank Capra and narrated by Burgess Meredith (among others), also interpolates Bless ’Em All in the soundtrack.

Betrayed
Chain Lightning
 The Proud And The Profane
The Thin Red Line
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movieposter.com,
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Image source:
movieposter.com,
with permission
Image source:
movieposter.com,
with permission
Image source:
movieposter.com,
with permission

Numerous postwar films about the late conflict used Bless ’Em All to establish atmosphere or to quote the era. In The Captive Heart (1946), a British film set in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and starring Michael Redgrave, POWs sing Bless ’Em All in their compound. It is heard briefly in the U.S. Army Air Force drama Twelve O’Clock High (1949), starring Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger, and in Chain Lightning (1950), Humphrey Bogart and Eleanor Parker are among the singers gathered around a piano in a wartime London nightclub. Also in 1950, in The Blue Lamp, the famous British police film starring Dirk Bogarde, a drunk serenades a police station with a snatch of the song.

The Young Lions
Twelve O'Clock High
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Author’s collection.

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Betrayed (1954), a story set in the German-occupied Netherlands and starring Clark Gable, Lana Turner, and Victor Mature, uses Bless ’Em All to good effect, particularly over the closing credits. Battle Cry (1955), based on the novel by Leon Uris and starring Van Heflin, James Whitmore, Raymond Massey, and Tab Hunter, also uses Bless ’Em All. In The Young Lions (1958), starring Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Dean Martin, it is heard, as usual, being sung in a London club.

The Long And The Short And The Tall — a gritty 1961 film starring Richard Todd, Laurence Harvey, Richard Harris, and David McCallum about British soldiers fighting the Japanese in the Malayan jungle — borrows Bless ’Em All’s lyrics for its title and, appropriately, uses the song over its opening and closing credits.

The song is also heard in Bless ’Em All, a 1949 comedy starring Hal Monty and Max Bygraves; The Proud And The Profane (1956), starring William Holden and Deborah Kerr; The Colditz Story (1957), starring John Mills and Eric Portman; Desert Mice, a 1959 comedy starring Sidney James; The Victors (1963), with an all-star international cast that includes George Peppard, Melina Mercouri, and Jeanne Moreau; and The Thin Red Line (1964), another film about US Marines on Guadalcanal, starring Keir Dullea and Jack Warden.

Bless ’Em All still surfaces in odd places: Paul McCartney, no less, sings a snatch of the song in his 1984 film Give My Regards To Broad Street, and Tommies sing it around a piano (what an original idea!) in the Academy-Award-nominated 2007 film Atonement, starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, and Vanessa Redgrave, whose father Michael appeared in a film that used the song more than half a century earlier.

 

Battle Cry
The Victors
 Give My Regards To Broad Street
Atonement
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movieposter.com,
with permission
Image source:
movieposter.com,
with permission
Image source:
movieposter.com,
with permission
Image source:
movieposter.com,
with permission

 

Everything Happens To Me (1938)

This 1938 Max Miller vehicle, featuring Max’s hijinks at the seaside, uses two Fred Godfrey numbers: the title song, which Max sings while settling down to sleep in his car on the beach, and the big production number, At The Bathing Parade, which Max sings as he introduces a parade of young lovelies in old and new bathing styles, followed by an extended dance routine.

 

Get Cracking The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother
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Image source:
thecinematrade.com,
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Home Guard Blues (1943)

This song was written for George Formby, Jr.’s 1943 film Get Cracking. The lad with the ukulele performs it sitting atop a home-made “tank” that is meant to help repel the invader.

 

 

The Kangaroo Hop (1912)

A hit for Billy Williams, “The Man in the Velvet Suit,” this take-off on the wacky animal dances of the era (the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, the Fox Trot — about the only one that survived) was revived in the zany Gene Wilder film, The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), where it is sung and danced to by Wilder, Madeleine Kahn, and Marty Feldman.

 

Let's Make Up Flyboys
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movieposter.com,
with permission
Image source:
movieposter.com,
with permission

Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty (1916)

One of the most famous British songs of World War One, Blighty is heard being sung by returning Tommies in the opening sequence of This Happy Breed (1944), David Lean’s film of Noël Coward’s great saga of an interwar British family, starring Robert Newton, Celia Johnson, John Mills, and Stanley Holloway. The song is interpolated, with a number of other Music Hall hits, in Let’s Make Up [also known as Lilacs In The Spring] (1956), starring Errol Flynn, Anna Neagle, and Peter Graves. In The L-Shaped Room (1962), Australian actress Cicely Courtneidge, playing an aging Music Hall star, belts it out in army tunic and cap. World War One British pilots also sing the song in their barracks in the 2006 film Flyboys.

 

Cavalcade
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Hershenson/Allen Archive,
http://emovieposter.com/

Take Me Back To Yorkshire (1910)

Noël Coward uses this song, performed by seaside singers, to quote the Edwardian era in Cavalcade, his Academy Award-winning 1933 film starring Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook.



Who Were You With Last Night? (1912)

This huge Fred Godfrey hit is heard on the soundtrack of the 1948 film of Terence Rattigan’s play The Winslow Boy, starring Robert Donat.