Charters and Caldicott, those delightfully self-absorbed cricket fans of Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" and Reed's "Night Train to Munich" return in a film all their own. The very British pair of gents are traveling through the Middle East, when their tour bus runs out of gas. Quite annoyed to spend a night in the middle of the desert, the quite proper Englishmen do not even have a change of clothes for dinner. When they reach Baghdad, the pair come into possession of a phonograph record with a coded message and unwittingly become involved with a nest of German spies. Blithely unaware of their predicament, they bumble along to Istanbul and barely escape falling into the river through a hole in the floor behind a hotel door marked "Bathroom." Caldicott is miffed of course; the door should be marked "Bosphorus." The plot is light with enough holes to shame Swiss cheese and irrelevant to the fun, which lies with the witty dead-pan interplay between Basil Radford as Charters and Naughton Wayne as Caldicott. International politics are of no concern to the pair, especially when compared to cricket scores, and their travels are just a journey from one pesky inconvenience to another. Charters and Caldicott are the tourists who should never leave home, because foreign countries are so full of people who neither speak English nor understand the importance of cricket.Charters and Caldicott are like a droll Abbott and Costello, minus the slapstick, and "Crook's Tour" resembles an Abbott and Costello movie. Like Abbott, Caldicott is a magnet for attractive women; despite his unlikely engagement to Charters's horse-faced sister, he returns the flirtatious interest of blonde Greta Gynt as La Palermo. Unfortunately, the movie also resembles the Abbott and Costello flicks with unwelcome musical intrusions, and, although the film is a relatively short 80 minutes long, La Palermo warbles a couple forgettable tunes that only slow down the action and take screen time from the stars. Despite the amusing leads, director John Baxter is no Hitchcock or Reed, and the film is more routine programmer than classic. However, the team of Radford and Wayne make the trip worthwhile.

Presented as an extra on the Criterion DVD of Hithcock's THE LADY VANISHES is the third of the films starring the two cricket enthusiasts first appearing in that picture, Crook's Tour which unlike the Hitchcock film has languished in obscurity. The two sportsmen, Charters and Caldicott, are on holiday in Persia as the film starts, on their way to Arabia. Their tour bus breaks down but they are quickly rescued by a sheik who happens to have attended the same school as Charters -- the English still treasured Empire in 1941, at least in film. Through a series of quite preposterous mix-ups and coincidences the two quickly become embroiled in a plot by the Nazis to destroy Arab oil pipelines, unwittingly taking the place of a couple of German spies as they traverse a route Eastward to Budapest. Along the way they meet (time and a gain) a beautiful German singer/spy who may be helping them or trying to kill them, and avert death several times through the most ridiculous of chances.I don't normally like to use words like "dated" but surely the appeal of this film is mostly going to be to English viewers of a certain age; most of the charm of Charters and Caldicott remaining unflappable and saying stereotypical upper-crusty Englishisms like "I say", "old man" and "Jolly what" over and over grew thin by the second reel. At no point until quite near the finish do they seem to understand or even care that they're in danger, and surely they are never in danger or breaking a sweat or removing their ties. Still, it moves at a fairly rapid pace and the leads (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) are amusing enough.

This is the third of the four films in which Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne play Charters and Caldicott, a couple of true-blue, somewhat dim, Englishmen whose main enthusiasm is cricket, their second being golf.Charters and Caldicott first appear, in supporting roles, in Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes". They next played very similar parts in "Night Train to Munich"—the reluctant and rather bumbling assistants to the dashing lead players.In this film they play the leads and though still tentative about becoming involved, they certainly do—and triumph in the end. Starting out in the desert in Saudi Arabia on a tour bus they reach Baghdad and while killing time, waiting for their train to Istanbul, go to a nightclub for something to eat. Here the management assumes they are two agents sent to pick up some top secret German plans to sabotage an Iraqi oil pipeline. They are given these and are pursued by the enemy agents to Budapest and to a castle on the Hungarian border, escaping several attempts on their lives by a series of flukes.Not a great film, but certainly amusing, and for those who enjoyed the first two films, a must-see.

After the Lady Vanishes (1938) Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne reprisedtheir roles as the cricket mad rather inept upper class Englishmen Charters and Caldicott. They bumble through Europe their stiff accents and manners getting themselves into trouble and rubbing people up the wrong way. They are on aRailway Station and they stop to show respect to the Ruritanian states national anthem. They stand rigid to all 23 verses which no one else takes any notice of and miss the train. They set out to conquor a mountain and they get covered in muck have all sorts of accidents but eventually the British bulldog comes out and they get there. Turning the corner at the summit they find a road and they follow it until they come to a sign. Getting out the phrase book it is deciphered as Bus Stop and just then it draws up. The road went up the other side of the mountain. Hilarious if only to look at Charters and Caldicott's deadpanexpressions. Charters and Caldicott reprised the roles twice more in the Night Train to Munich which returns to spies and Millions like us a wartime moraleboosting film.