An all-star vaudeville and revvue entertainement compered by Tommy Handley from the studios of B.I.P at Elsiree, the artists leing drawn mainly from London’s musical shows. […] In between the numbers, Donald Calthrop abortively attempts to recite Shakespeare and Gordon Harker tries to receive the show on his home-made television set. […] Tommy Handley’s opening remarks about talent for this revue being drawn from Hollywood, Shoreditch and Ashby -de-la-Zouch forcibly remind one that Elstree Calling is an English production, homelier, tattier and, on balance, livelier than the streamlined Revues, Parades and Follies with which Hollywood celebrated the coming of sound. No other revue of the period has so much material lifted straight from current stage shows, and no other includes proletarian performers from the musical-hall like Lily Morris and Will Fyffe. […] Alfred Hitchcock, credited with the direction of “sketches and other interpolated items” – which means in effect the very brief shetch Thriller, the burlesque of Taming of the Shrew (reshot after Brunel’s qwetly subtle version of it had been rejected by the executive producer John Marwell), and the scenes of Gordon Hacker – has dismissed his contribution as “of no interest whatever”. The assessment is a little harsh, but there’s no doubt that the Shrew burlesque, with its sallies of custard pies and Donald Calthrop riding around on a motorbile in the manner of D.Fairbanhs, is the most laboured of all the comic sequences. (Geoff Brown, Monthly Film Bulletin, 10/1975, nr.42).

This in fact, is the fault with the whole production: many things start well and then do not come off. One thing that it does is to show they cannot here, whatever can be done elsewhere, transfer vaude and burlesque artists to the screen with stage material. If the cast has been assembled and then had new and characteristic, but cinematic, stuff written abott them, a good picture might have emerged. As it is, except for nome values in the provinces, where some of the artists have never penetrated, Elstree Calling calls to deaf ears” (Variety, February 26, 1930)