This is the film quite rightly regarded as the best George Formby vehicle, with a much more interesting suspense story mixed together as usual with some rousing tunes on his banjolele. I think Leslie Halliwell even included it in his top 100 films of all time, probably pushing the boat out a bit too far for most people!

At Dover George is on his way to Blackpool with the rest of his Dinky Doo troupe, but in the wartime blackout gets lost and ends up in Bergen Norway instead. There through a case of mistaken identity (what happened to the real uke player?) he finds a job awaiting him in sinister Garry Marsh's dance band. The trouble is Marsh is a Nazi agent (spoken incredulously: "A British subject working for Hitler") passing on information to U Boats - George helps decode his messages with the assistance of British agent Phyllis Calvert. He not only has the Nazis to contend with but an outraged Norwegian Bernard Lee popping up throughout to get him for asking his wife if she was a Dinky Doo. The doped up dream sequence where he manages to get to Berlin and sock Hitler on the jaw went down well with the British audiences at the time too – definitely not as subtle as Chaplin's Great Dictator though! Great songs: Granddad's Flannelette Nightshirt in the refreshment room to Hal Gordon's utter delight, Mr. Wu's A Window Cleaner Now at band rehearsal, Count Your Blessings And Smile (with the badly dated hep swing trio) & Oh Don't The Wind Blow Cold both in the nightclub. This was Marsh's last Formby film, he joined the RAF just after for the duration of the War; George's mate Ronald Shiner was only given one line in here; Phyllis Calvert got paid the princely sum of £20 a week for the 6 weeks it took to film, and apparently didn't think much of the hero she was supporting – a very dull man who seemed to be always tinkering about with watches being some of her more charitable comments in the 1980's.

Well, it's not a dull film, a low budget period propaganda piece that worked in all departments with plenty of inconsequential but memorable scenes and one I watch every few years with no lessening of enjoyment.

The original title was,"Lets do it,".This is a very funny anti Nazi movie.Once again George innocently gets himself in trouble.He plays a banjo player for the Dinki Do's. He's on a ship to go with his band , but,is misconstrued as a Nazi spy that was suppose to replace a banjo player ,that was killed in the orchestra,headed by sneaky Nazi spy,Mendez,played by Garry Marsh.His dancer ,Iris,played by Coral Browne also part of the Nazi spy operation.So he ends up in Norway.Phyllis Calvert, which i got confused with Corinne Calvert,is a hotel ,who is also a spy for the British.So by accident he end sup looking for the secret codes ,that the Nazi use, to blow up some British ships.He finds out that the orchestra leader writes them on the music notes and plays them with the orchestra,so the radio can hear it and the Germans Nazis can pick up the code.As with his other pictures he get into a big mess.Like when Iris tries to seduce him to get his passport to determine if he is one of them.Another scene which he chases a camera that going through the bakery and he ends up in a pile of dough.He eventually ends up in the Nazi submarine headed by a young Torin Thatcher,of the robe and Demetrius and the Gladiators,fouling up the Nazis plan to blow up a ship where Mary,played by Phyllis,is at.Only ending up on the ship from the torpedo shell. Great British comedy from 1940. I don't know if it was before or after England was bombed.09/28/12

In wartime England, the #1 box-office attraction was George Formby, a chirpy little comedian with a Lancashire accent who sang comic songs while strumming his "banjolele" (a ukelele-sized banjo). His screen character was a virginal simpleton who always caused disasters (through his own incompetence) and then solved them through sheer dumb luck. At the end of each movie, George always got the girl ... but he never kissed her, since his real-life wife Beryl was usually present on the movie set to make sure that no hanky-panky transpired.

"Let George Do It" is Formby's funniest film. He portrays a banjo-player who stumbles into a wartime espionage plot. There's some genuine suspense when the bad guys show up during his nightclub act, planning to murder George ... who (as always) is blissfully unaware of the danger he's in.

Formby's songs often featured double-entendre humour, just slightly smutty. In this film, he sings two of his best songs: "Count Your Blessings and Smile" and "Mister Wu's a Window-Washer Now".

There's a Hitchcock-like plot line, with plenty of action. In one scene, a U-boat full of Nazis rolls over and over underwater, and the film crew came up with a clever way to create this effect convincingly on a low budget. Compare this scene to a similar scene in Frank Capra's "State of the Union", in which Van Johnson is aboard a plane that's rolling in midair. The Capra film had a much larger budget, yet the effect looks completely fake.

Some of the wartime jokes in "Let George Do It" will escape Americans, such as the gag about Lord Haw-Haw. (The G.I.s in the Pacific had Tokyo Rose; the British soldiers in wartime Europe had to deal with Lord Haw-Haw.) There's also a joke about Formby's hometown Wigan. In the same way that Jack Benny (from Waukegan) and Lou Costello (from Paterson, New Jersey) often worked their hometowns into their material, George Formby never forgot his Wigan roots. "Let George Do It" features lots of slapstick comedy and some excellent songs; you'll enjoy it. I rate this film 8 out of 10. Turned out nice again!