No Lady

I'm inserting reviews for all films I'v seen that lack one, this rarity has recently been shown on talking pictures, so more people will have a chance to see it, possibly someone will write a more favorable review? well here is mine... Staring, directed and co-written by Lupino Lane, he plays a henpecked stepfather who when holidaying in Blackpool is mistaken for an enemy spy, in a plot involving the sabotage of a radio controlled glider contest! The plot is as irrelevant as it is unlikely, this film is simply an excuse to showcase it's star, it all comes down to is he funny? Well on this evidence Mr Lane joins the long list of successful stage comedians whose talents did not translate to the silver screen, not awful, but of curio value only.

There just may be some (very) senior citizens still alive in Blackpool who remember the film crew at large on the front making this zany comedy (described by Rachel Low as a "badly directed, under-rehearsed and distasteful film") that for much of it's running time looks like (and probably is) a silent film with an effects track rather than a true talkie.

The enemy agents our hero tangles with come from a foreign country called Ptomania, pronounced the same way as the country Adenoid Hynkel later became the great dictator of.

"Pog" (Lupino Lane) is the rather hen-pecked patriarch of a family who heads off to the seaside with his wife and offspring for their annual summer holiday. Once there, he is mistaken for a criminal mastermind and is soon embroiled in the nefarious activities of a gang of spies and crooks. Can he extricate himself from their dastardly schemes? Essentially, this is vehicle for a stage and silent film star who looks completely ill-at-ease in front of a camera into which, this time, he is expected to speak. The drama itself is the thinnest and the familial malarkey with wife (Lola Hunt) and the celebration of Britons on deckchairs wearing bowler hats eating ice cream comes across more scathing than ridiculous. There's some room for a bit of uncomplicated drag, and even some aeronautical antics at the end but this is really only watchable now as a curio of what we watched almost a century ago, what made us laugh and who tickled our fancy.

Henpecked Lupino Lane, Lola Hunt, and his five stepchildren go on a holiday to Blackpool. There, he is mistaken for a spy from Ptomania, whose associates plan to crash the British glider in the competition, winning fifty-thousand-pound prize for Ptomania.

It's all an excuse for long sequences shot wild -- that is, without sound -- in which Lane performs his amazing acrobatics and slapstick routines around the holiday town. Those sequences are quite good, but the cheapness of the production, the poor sound track, and the slapdash writing don't make this particularly good. It reminds me of the proposition that Buster Keaton made to the higher-ups at MGM, to make silent films with talking sequences. I expect the scenarios would have been better than this mishmosh of sequences from THE ADVENTURER, cross-dressing, and puns. Still, it's always fun to see Lane run up a wall. With Sari Maritza and Wallace Lupino.

Just watched No Lady on Talking Pictures and I must confess that I enjoyed it. True the story is silly but the film was far better than I expected. There was little evidence that it was made just four years into the talkies and Lupino Lane was a superb acrobatic comedian. This production did him justice.