George Gullip (George Formby) works in a newspaper, at the printing press, but fancies himself as something of a budding detective, not with the police but as a private operator like Sherlock Holmes. To that end, he has been devising his own signature accoutrements to ensure he can track down criminals, and that includes special ink that will stick to the fingers of suspects and can only be removed with his special formula. Unfortunately, George's invention has got onto the cat, which in turn has left pawprints over the front page, but luckily for him the boss doesn't want that front page to be published since he does not believe the lead story about a counterfeiting ring is anything the general public would be interested in. But what does he know?
Trouble Brewing - and yes, that is a pun in the title, as you will see - was Formby's follow-up to a string of successes that rang the box office tills consistently from the mid-nineteen-thirties to the mid-forties, indeed, he was the top box office draw in Britain for most of those years. This was another hit for him, and as his formula was more or less set in stone by this stage, audiences were happy with what they were offered, the comedy thrills premise, the three or four songs added to satisfy his fans, the love interest George doesn't get too amorous with because his wife Beryl was watching him like a hawk and jealously disapproved of anything like that. Nevertheless, right at the end there was a kiss between him and co-star Googie Withers.
Exactly how they got away with that is not known, but George must have suffered when Beryl saw the completed film, mind you, he didn't have much to complain about: as with his comedy and song near-contemporary across the Atlantic, Danny Kaye, it was his wife who had seen to it that Formby was able to be as huge in the hearts of the world's public as he was. Well, much of the world, he never took off in the United States, but thanks to these movies prevailing at the pictures when they were released, and later being staples of television broadcasts, works like Trouble Brewing picked up new generations of fans for Formby, well after his relatively early demise in his mid-fifties. This one was blessed with a few good laughs at his gormless persona, and a sense of triumph when he won the day in the closing reel.
