Crook's Tour

 

(1940)
Directed by John Baxter
Written by Barbara K. Emery, Max Kester, John Watt
Starring Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, Greta Gynt
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I wouldn't exactly call Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as comedy team. More like comic relief. They appeared in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes as a couple of silly British tourists obsessed with cricket scores over anything else. They were so effective there that the appeared in several films playing the same characters. Crook's Tour is one of these.

Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) are traveling in the the middle east. Eventually, the end up in Baghdad and are mistaken for spies. La Palermo (Greta Gynt), a cafe singer, hands them a record with secret information. When the real spies show up, they go after the two. After some miraculous good luck, they discover the secret and that La Palermo is a double agent for the British. 

The movie never rises above silliness. The spy plot is contrived and the way they get mistaken for the real agents makes little sense for a secret organization. Still, Charters and Caldicott are often funny and, if the jokes are telegraphed, well, it's all par for the course.  

Some of the funnier moments are when they encounter an Arab sheik and discover not only does he speak English, but went to the same UK school as the two.  But, though the sequence is amusing, it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot; everything in it is of no consequence.  Another good scene (with plot implications), is their reaction when a fellow Briton (supposedly) does not follow cricket, as though they can't conceive of the idea.

This was originally a series of radio plays.