Champagne Charlie (1944) - film review

In 1860, Joe Saunders and his brother Fred give up their mining jobs and try to find work in London.  Joe immediately gets a job as a bar singer in a public house.  His crowd-pleasing songs reach the ears of a music hall manager, Bessie Bellwood, who offers him a contract.  Adopting the stage name George Leybourne, Joe is an instant hit, but his popularity makes him the hated rival of another performer, the Great Vance.  A desperate feud ensues, in which the two singers frantically try to out-do each other.  Joe ultimately triumphs with a new song entitled Champagne Charlie, which becomes his nickname.   Unfortunately, his success may be short-lived.  The existence of the music halls is threatened by the theatre owners, who are determined to have them all closed down...

Champagne Charlie is one of the forgotten gems of British cinema of the 1940s, an affectionate and highly entertaining tribute to England’s great music hall tradition.  Made by Ealing Studios during WWII – the closest the company ever got to making a full-blown musical – it is one of the few British films made at the time which had no obvious propaganda content.  

The film was directed by the Brazilian-born Alberto Cavalcanti, during his productive time at Ealing Studios in the 1940s.  He had started making films in France in the 1920s, working with Marcel L’Herbier at one point, before making a series of documentaries for the GPO in England in the 1930s.  Cavalcanti’s other Ealing features include: Went the Day Well? (1942) and Nicholas Nickleby (1947).

The success of Champagne Charlie was largely down to the ebullient contributions from its lead actors, who were two of the best-known faces in England at the time, Tommy Trinder and Stanley Holloway.  Trinder was an enormously popular comedian in the ’40s and ’50s, known for his catch phrase "You lucky people". Holloway was a highly regarded actor of stage and screen, best remembered for his portrayal of Alfred P. Doolittle in George Cukor’s My Fair Lady (1964).  Trinder and Holloway form an amazing double act and throw literally everything they have into this film.  They relish the comedy, they relish the songs, and we, the audience, relish their larger-than-life performances.

The film has been criticised for its historical inaccuracies.  The Victorian England it presents is a cheerful working class utopia, a long way from the squalor and poverty we find in Dickens’s novels.  Also, the music halls it shows us are closer to the familiar variety theatres of the late 19th Century than the bawdy alehouses of the 1860s.  Of course, such criticism misses entirely the point of the film. Cavalcanti’s intention was not historical accuracy but escapism.  His film was aimed at an audience who were weary of the privations of a seemingly interminable war and who were looking back into the past for comfort – hence the immense popularity of films such as David Lean’s This Happy Breed, also released in 1944.

Champagne Charlie shows us a highly nostalgic, idealised view of England’s past.  At the time the film was released, music halls – once the most popular form of mass entertainment in Britain – were becoming a thing of the past, driven out of business by the arrival of cinemas.  Many people watching this film in 1944 would have been familiar with the music halls and would have delighted in being taken back down memory lane, to a mythical happier time, before the war.

Today, that link with the past has been lost, and the film serves another purpose: to preserve the memory of Britain’s fine music hall past.   It may have one or two flaws (the plotting is messy and the ending a tad rushed), but as a piece of escapist fun, Champagne Charlie stands up well when placed alongside cinema’s better known film musicals.  It is a light-hearted film that brims with an intoxicating charm and bubbly sense of optimism – and the songs are irresistibly catchy.  If there is one Ealing film which deserves to be better promoted, this is certainly it.

© James Travers 2008

For Champagne Charlie is my name.
Champagne drinking is my game.
There’s no drink as good as fizz! fizz! fizz!
I’ll drink ev’ry drop there is, is, is!
All round the town it is the same.
By Pop! Pop! Pop! I rose to fame.
I’m the idol of the barmaids
And Champagne Charlie is my name...



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