Word: cockney
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...GIRL Effervescent, corny and completely irresistible, this 1937 British musical about a Cockney turned lord has conquered Broadway. Robert Lindsay's seemingly matchless star turn is gloriously rivaled by his once and future successor, Jim Dale...
Looked at analytically, Me and My Girl should not be so infectiously exhilarating. The lyrics are banal and devoid of wit; the songs, though hummable and winsome, tend to have the same simple beat; and the narrative -- a reworking of Pygmalion in which a cheerily crooked Cockney finds himself heir to an earldom and a fortune if he can learn to behave like a swell -- is comic but farfetched. Yet the gaudy $4 million production has an unabashed desire to please, touches of sprightly invention (a mounted suit of armor abruptly walks offstage; ancestor portraits come alive and tap-dance...
...role of Bill Snibson, the Cockney peer, was originally a star turn for Lupino Lane, a comic mime of the '30s. Lindsay, seen in the U.S. as Edmund in Laurence Olivier's TV King Lear, proves an inspired successor. He has mastered the stereotypical Cockney's accusatory inflections, rough humor, feral grace and odd parlor tricks, from a no-hands bobbing of his hat on his head to incessant, playful swiping of a bystander's gold watch. He brings vitality to such shopworn comedy as passing out, being revived and protesting, "Here! I didn't faint for water...
...develops a jealous and possessive affection for Simone, trying to please her aristocratic tastes in a sad, bumbling, endearing way, sipping tea instead of Bloody Marys. In one scene, a waiter approaches him, "Bloody Mary, right?" "No, I'd like a pot of tea," George replies in his wonderful Cockney accent. "Earl Grey or Lapsang Soochong?" "No, tea," he says...
...indulge it to her profit. Well, it's a living. But to George (Bob Hoskins), assigned by a mob boss to be Simone's chauffeur, it seems a living hell. How can she endure these rough hands and tawdry nightdreams? How can she not respond to his courtly Cockney love? Simone does respond, in the only way she knows, by using him. She sends her squire out to play knight, searching the Soho underworld for the girl who will fulfill Simone's fantasies and pry open George's blinkered eyes...