Sailors Three (1940)

Sailors Three: Directed by Walter Forde. With Tommy Trinder, Claude Hulbert, Carla Lehmann, Michael Wilding. Three British sailors find they’ve accidentally strayed on board a Nazi ship during WWII. They then proceed to take it over and requisition it for the Royal Navy.

“Proudly billed as a British film, Sailors Three was a brave attempt to emulate successful American light comedy of the 1930u0026#39;s, but the screenplay retains a Britishness that is very powerful, and therefore the film falls between two stools.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eReleased in 1940 it could hardly avoid a wartime theme, and the three main male characters are Royal Navy Sailors. Tommy Trinder has a couple of songs and there are some references to his music hall persona. While the film was being made, we were still in the phoney war period, and the Germans could still be portrayed as comical buffoons. So when thirty or so German sailors re-board their ship, that the three British sailors have taken over (with the help of an Austrian, played by James Hayter, best known for doing voice-overs for Mr Kipling cakes), no-one produces a firearm, and the brave Brits manage to overpower them one at a time, mostly by knocking them on the head with something; we get a hollow coconut u0026quot;clopu0026quot; sound, and thatu0026#39;s another enemy sailor hors de combat.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe romantic interest is also played in a rather unreal, stilted way; maybe the need for a U certificate (allowing children to see the film) forced this. Being upper class, Carla (Jane Davies) only toys amusedly with the common sailorsu0026#39; amorous advances on shore. And when she is on the captured German ship, and a British plane is sighted, she exclaims u0026quot;Oh, how absolutely delightful!u0026quot;u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eSo on a number of counts, the result is u0026quot;nice try, but really not quite on the buttonu0026quot;. Interesting nowadays only as a historical document.”