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Trigger-quick on wisecracks, some of them corny even for a simple-minded oater, this horseplay opera is a Technicolored remake of the 1936 Bing Crosby musical, Rhythm on the Range. Its chief assets: four new songs by Sammy Cahn and James Van Heusen, two leading ladies (Lori Nelson and Jackie Loughery), and a personable prize bull named Cuddles, who provides a beefy relief from the Martin and Lewis brand of ham.
Private's Progress (Boulting Bros.; D.C.A.) is a novelty among British war films; instead of focusing on the stiff upper lip of the British Tommy, it tickles his soft underbelly. The film is irreverently dedicated to the goldbricking gladiators of World War II: "To all those who got away with it," adding, "The producers gratefully acknowledge the official cooperation of absolutely nobody."
It is war a la Wodehouse. Private Stanley Windrush, played with a slightly pained, Bertie Woosterish expression by Ian Carmichael, progresses erratically from Gravestone Barracks, where he wakes up "feeling a little fragile," to an officers' selection board, where he confounds psychiatrists and loses his pants during an obstacle run. In the course of the hurlyburly, Windrush absorbs some of the rules of artful dodging in the service, e.g., "Never give your right name to anybody; otherwise they've got you," gets involved in a harebrained "Operation Hatrack" conceived by "Uncle Bertie," otherwise Brigadier General Bertram Tracepurcel. Uncle Bertie's scheme: to disguise a platoon of British Tommies as Nazis, send them into Germany to snatch a cache of art treasures which Uncle Bertie plans to sell on the British black market.
U.S. moviegoers may be baffled by private jokes that put Britons in stitches, e.g., a major who abuses underlings by bellowing. "You're an absolute shower!" —an abbreviated allusion to a British army phrase which might be paraphrased as a deluge of offal. But the skilled producer-director-writer team of John and Roy Boulting (Seven Days to Noon) keeps all this nonsense spinning along blithely, has made Private's Progress a sort of British-accented Keystone Kaper, with pratfalls, chases and cuties in uniform that any nationality can relish without special training.