Cheers Boys Cheer

Edmund Gwenn - Ironside
Peter Coke - John Ironside
C.V. France - Greenleaf
Jimmy O'Dea - Matt Boyle
Alexander Knox - Saunders
Graham Moffatt - Albert
Moore Marriott - Geordie

Cheer Boys Cheer was Walter Forde's last film to be released from the Studios before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, it was about rivalry between two brewing factions. Greenleaf stands for good old-fashioned English ale and traditional pubs, Ironside for chromium-plated efficiency and ruthless marketing policies.

Greenleaf resist a takeover and so an Ironside scion joins the old family firm incognito with the intention of finding a way to undermine it. Instead he falls for the Greenleaf daughter, and is gradually won round to the virtues of the old-fashioned way of doing things. The film ends with harmony all round, the families united in matrimony and business partnership. Cheer Boys Cheer was the prototype of the Ealing comedies of a decade later, albeit much more broad in approach, with sequences such as those involving Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt bordering on slapstick; but his suggestion that Ironside and Greenleaf are metaphors for Nazi Germany and England cannot be taken too literally without the conclusion becoming unpalatable. One of the screenwriters was Roger Macdougall, who would be responsible for The Man in the White Suit eleven years later.
Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing.