Over the Garden Wall (1950, UK)

Norman Evans as Mrs Lawton Norman Evans was a long-standing attraction in the British music hall, and his best-known routine was as a gross middle-aged woman supposedly having a conversation with the woman who lived next door, over the garden wall. The material is corny now, but at the time in the 1930's and 1940's he was hugely successful.


Playing the saxophone This film was a vehicle for this personality, in which he plays Mrs Lawton, living with a husband (played by Jimmy James, himself a long-serving music hall entertainer) and two lodgers. All four of them seem to work at a factory, and a subplot involves their daughter, who has married an American serviceman, coming to visit and bringing a "baby", which turns out to be a dog.

The music hall tradition, a series of "turns" doing relatively short spot performances, led to a belief that a feature comedy film had to be punctuated with musical interludes, and here Evans plays the saxophone for the family and friends.


At the works concert In fact the factory has a works concert to enable more extended musical comedy routines to be inserted; Evans is playing the big drum at the right of the picture, while this unnamed cross-dressed character mimes ineffectually to a gramophone record. I think the actor may be Eli Woods, who appeared on the music hall stage as a simpleton character; Woods has already appeared briefly in that role in the film.


Over the wall talking to the neighbour The film would not be complete without Evans doing his Garden Wall routine, gossiping to some unseen female neighbour. He has enhanced his bust for this, because part of the routine -- eagerly anticipated by the audience who knew what was coming -- was that he pretended to slip off the step he was standing on, squashing his bosom on the top of the wall as he fell.

HF June 2009


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