The Vicar of Bray

Mercifully this period drama is the kind of film they don't make any more, but it's not without moments of interest as a historical artefact. Making extravagantly expansive gestures and projecting to the rear of the music-hall stalls, Stanley Holloway shows why he took so long to establish himself as a screen performer, here playing the Irish clergyman who is hired to tutor the future Charles II but finds himself matchmaking in an English Civil War version of Romeo and Juliet instead. The songs are ghastly and the period trappings cheap and inaccurate, but Felix Aylmer and Garry Marsh go some way towards atoning for the film's deficiencies.