Union Jackanapes

Follow a Star (Rank; Zenith) is a rickety vaudeville vehicle designed to display the low-comedy high jinks of British Buffoon Norman Wisdom, an artificial hybrid who seems to have resulted from the cross-pollination of Tom Ewell Jerry Lewis and an otter. Wisdom plays a knockabout Cockney trying to sing his way from pants presser to Palladium. Enroute, he falls off a psychiatrist's couch is clobbered over the head by a fat-lady voice coach ("We must always remember to keep our vowels open!"), gets stuck astraddle a spiked, swinging gate. When that gets rusty, he drops ice cubes down m'lady's bosom, pulls the rug out from under a gaggle of dancers, crunches up the boss's dishes in the clothes washer.

When the pratfall and pie-in-the-puss comedy tires him, Comic Wisdom resorts to a genus of comedy that in seven films (all hits) and numberless TV shows he has failed to master: pantomime. While allowing himself to be duped by a charlatan of a music-hall star (played to seedy perfection by Jerry Desmonde), he lisps, giggles, gawks, grimaces, mugs and burbles. "Aggressive," is his psychiatrist's diagnosis at film's end. "I think you'd better grow up a little."

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