Rent One Exciting Night (1944)

Bring Out your Bedheads - One Exciting Night review by CH

Vera Lynn and espionage are not subjects often thought to go flag-wavingly hand in hand. That is to reckon without her third, and final, film One Exciting Night (1944). This was directed by Walter Forde, whose skills often turned around both comedy and thrillers - and, what's more, given his music-hall upbringing, he had a relish of the stage.

All of these elements come together in the seventy minutes of this wartime yarn. It finds her caught up in a plot by which an English government official (Donald Stewart) has brought back to London from Lisbon a rolled-up Rembrandt drawing sent there for safe keeping but now sought after by a bunch of well-heeled thieves whose base is a Piccadilly apartment knee-knockingly high above a night club.

The light and shadow of the film's cinematography, whether beside a railway station's cloakroom or beneath a theatre's stage, is a model of effective contrast. Here is no White Cliffs propaganda but entertainment of sufficiently high order to remind viewers that central to civilization is a relish of all its variety.

As such, the film's military nurse Vera Lynn finds herself given songs suited to a small club's audience – and she handles them so well. She has panache, she has humour – and there are moments when it reminds us of those well-staged situations in which Jessie Matthews had found herself.

If no masterpiece, One Exciting Night remains a joy eighty years on. And it has an undoubted classic scene in which Vera Lynn sings through a truck's megaphone to urge one and all – above and below stairs – to bring forth their earthly goods for recycling. The proffered goods make the charity shops of our era appear a model of restraint.