Give Us the Moon *** (1944, Margaret Lockwood, Vic Oliver, Peter Graves, Jean Simmons, Roland Culver) – Classic Movie Review 7004

The original British film poster for Give Us the Moon (1944).

Writer-director Val Guest’s intriguing, delightfully frivolous 1944 British comedy is about a group of drop-outs who found The White Elephant Club above a London Soho restaurant, run by Nina, a beautiful young White Russian émigrée (Margaret Lockwood). Fascinatingly, although made in 1943 to 1944, the film looks forward to the joys of a peacetime Britain, and is set a few years after the end of World War Two.

Peter Graves also stars as the former wartime RAF pilot Peter, the young wastrel son of a hard-working hotel owner, who discovers their little game from Nina’s precocious younger sister Heidi (Simmons), who proposes that he is made a club member to stop him spilling the beans to the newspapers. So Peter joins the society called The White Elephants, whose principle is to abide by a complete disregard for work. But then there is trouble in store when the society decides to help run the hotel owned by Peter’s father, Mr Pyke (Frank Cellier).

Lockwood enjoys her unusual piece of casting as a useful change of pace from her Gainsborough melodramas, and this flippant idea makes for a funny film thanks to its amusing plot, super old-time cast and witty on-target script, full of levity. It marks the 15-year-old Simmons’s film debut.

Director Guest scripts from the 1939 novel The Elephant Is White by Caryl Brahms and  her Russian émigré writing partner S J Simon, with additional dialogue by Caryl Brahms, S J Simon and Howard Irving Young. They change the story from Thirties Paris to London in the late Forties. It is filmed at Gainsborough Studios, Islington, London.

Also in the cast are Vic Oliver, Max Bacon, Roland Culver, Eliot Makeham, Iris Lang, George Relph, Gibb McLaughlin, Irene Handl, Alan Keith, John Salew and Harry Hewitt.

Give Us the Moon is directed by Val Guest, runs 95 minutes, is released by Gainsborough Pictures,  is released by General Film Distributors (UK), is written by Val Guest, based on Caryl Brahms and S J Simon’s novel The Elephant Is White, with additional dialogue by Caryl Brahms, S J Simon and Howard Irving Young, is shot in black and white by Phil Grindrod, is produced by Edward Black, scored by Bob Busby (incidental music) and Louis Levy (musical director), and designed by Maurice Carter.

Give Us the Moon premiered at the New Gallery cinema in London on 31 July 1944, less than two months after D-Day and nearly a year before the war ended in Europe.

It is one of the six classic movies in The Margaret Lockwood Collection DVD, also including The Wicked Lady (1945), Love Story (1944), Bank Holiday (1938), Highly Dangerous (1950), and The Lady Vanishes (1938).

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7004

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