It's pictures like this which give English films from the early thirties such a bad reputation. Saying that however it's not without some charm - it gives you a similar feeling of excitement to seeing your little one in the school play and relief that she managed to get through it without forgetting her lines. I did watch it all the way through though so it can't have been that bad.
Julius Hagen's Twickenham Studios did create a handful of excellent pictures (particularly those made by Bernard Vorhaus) but the main purpose of his studio was to make the quota quickies, screen fillers to satisfy the legal legislation to ensure that a certain proportion of films shown in the UK were made in the UK. Quality wasn't important, speed and cheapness were. They would often see how much film they had and work out how many scenes they could take with that length and make a movie sometimes in a day.
This one however does have quite a clever story but Henry Edwards is certainly no Alfred Hitchcock and his actors are certainly not actors. Not fair because they were working under absurd conditions and the titular Man Who Changed His Name himself was the headmaster in GOODBYE MR CHIPS so he must have been able to act give a proper script/director/budget/salary! Sometimes you start to watch a old film and it's so bad you can't continue. I didn't get that urge with this - there was some sort of residual primal energy or enthusiasm from 1934 still there which kept my attention. Oh my God, I'm starting to sound like I actually enjoyed this aren't I!
