Since Brandon Thomas's play Charley's Aunt debuted on the London stage its popularity is unabated to this day. Somewhere in this world there's a stock company doing this material and some actor regaling his audience with the image of that cigar smoking matronly aunt in drag.For an English play this 1941 version boasts a mixed cast of Americans and English players that 20th Century Fox assembled. Purists would surely object to this mixed cast. But Darryl Zanuck in casting Jack Benny in the lead had guaranteed box office with one of the most popular radio stars around. James Ellison and Richard Haydn are trying to make time with a pair of young girls visiting Oxford played by Anne Baxter and Arleen Whelan. They kind of blackmail their roommate Jack Benny into donning the drag he will be using for one of the Oxford theater society plays into being Haydn's long lost aunt from Brazil.Trouble is that the long lost aunt has at the same time turned up in the United Kingdom. Kay Francis for reasons of her own has decided to visit her nephew Richard Haydn at Oxford. After this the story becomes hilariously confusing as both Edmund Gwenn as Baxter's guardian and Laird Cregar as Ellison's father become quite taken with Benny in drag. Think of Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot.Gwenn is an old miser who enjoys a rich income being the guardian of Baxter and her fortune. As for Cregar in real life he was three years younger than Ellison his son. But Cregar was a classically trained character actor could play a variety of parts. Back in the day Charles Laughton whose career Cregar's was starting to resemble said that the censor's could never censor the gleam in his eyes. Cregar had an exponential gleam in this and other parts. Sadly he would die within a few years.Probably an English production would capture the entire essence of Charley's Aunt. But the British were never blessed to claim Jack Benny as one of their own.

Thanks to the enthusiasm and capable acting by the entire cast, as well as the opulently mounted art direction by Richard Day and Nathan Juran, this venerable stage vehicle comes across rather well. True, Archie Mayo's direction is not particularly distinguished. Nor could George Seaton's screenplay be described as a model of cinematic adaptation. But the film was made in a workmanlike fashion and its gains kudos for its lavish production values. Jack Benny plays "Babs" with an endearing enthusiasm, and receives excellent support from Kay Francis, James Ellison, Anne Baxter, Edmund Gwenn, Laird Cregar, Reginald Owen, Arleen Whelan, Ernest Cossart and company. It's still very much a filmed stage play, despite its cinematic opening sequence which includes some particularly well-timed slapstick. But then it goes straight into the play which has been filmed mostly in long takes – though they are skillfully disguised by fluid camera movements and smooth inter-cutting. Sad to say, the play itself has now lost its position as the most successful (in monetary terms) comedy ever written. Its author, Brandon Thomas was not a professional writer. The son of a Liverpool shoemaker, he was born on Christmas Day, 1848. At the age of twelve, he became a shipwright's apprentice in order to support his mother who took in lodgers – mostly actors who were always behind with their rent money! Eventually, Brandon took up acting himself and started to write plays – both with the same lack of success. One day, W.S. Penley, a highly successful London comedian, happened to cast his eye over one of Brandon's manuscripts. "This isn't bad!" he told the young author. "Why don't you write a comedy for me?" Young Thomas scratched his head. "What sort of a comedy?" he asked. "You've played every character under the sun! Wait a minute! Have you ever thought of playing a woman?" The play's record-breaking London run of 1,466 performances was only outclassed – until Agatha Christie came along – by "Chu Chin Chow" (a play so popular that its author, Oscar Asche, became such a household word that in rhyming slang, "Oscar Asche" became a synonym for "cash". "Got any Oscar Asche?" my grand-dad would often ask.)

Most cross-dressing films ("Crying Game" excepted) require a fundamental stretch of the imagination--that Dustin Hoffman, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon (and Tom Hanks for that matter) can all be accepted as women with only a wig, a dress and a falsetto voice. Hoffman took the disguise farther since "Tootsie" was a much milder farce, and almost succeeded, but still there was that voice. Jack Benny in drag requires far more of a stretch than the rest, as he is easily the uuuugliest cross-dresser ever. Wearing only a bad wig and a Mother Hubbard over rolled-up pants (from which much humor derives), he could well have been used as the model for J. Thaddeus Toad's female get-up in Disney's "Wind in the Willows." What makes it funnier is, he's the most reluctant female impersonator of all, and not above mixing it up in most manly fashion with the fellow students who have coerced him into this masquerade. You can get the plot from several other reviews. What's weird is that the two gorgeous ingénues in the flick (one of them Anne Baxter, long before Eve and Nefertiri) spend a lot of time necking with this supposed old lady, and not reluctantly. WE know "she's" a man but THEY don't, yet there they sit smooching it up with "her" and enjoying it. Kinky-winky, as Paul (center square) Lynde used to say. Fortunately for those who find all this a bit too odd even for farce there's the wavishing Kay Fwancis, wavishing indeed, as the title character and reason for all this foolishness, and along with Laird Cregar (playing it straight for once) the calm center of the storm. Quite funny even if some of it is unswallowable.

1941 was the season for two comedies starring the inimitable Jack Benny with Charley's Aunt released in 1941 and the filming of Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be starring Benny and Carol Lombard in what was unfortunately her last film which was released early in 1942.Both are great ensemble films, and both stand the test of time. I find it difficult to say which of Benny's two characterizations I find the better; so, I must group them together as proof that Jack Benny was one of film's best but also one of its most under-appreciated comic actors.Benny is Charley's aunt just as he is Joseph Tura in To Be or Not To Be. Yes, some of Benny's persona with its slow takes that was a mainstay of his TV persona for so many years is evident in both films but, I might add, in entirely different ways and definitely in keeping wit the two roles.Benny is not just Benny but a great actor who has managed to assume the character of the two roles.Charley's Aunt continues to be performed and continues to be filmed; nevertheless, I recommend any film buff and any troupe planning on presenting Charley's Aunt to watch the Jack Benny version again and then again.