The Calendar

This is actually based on a play by Edgar Wallace, the famous British thriller author who divided his time equally between writing and going to the track; not surprisingly a few of his novels have a racing background. This story isn't actually much of a thriller as such, although it does have some crime content. Our hero (John McCallum) has sent an important message to his gold-digging girlfriend written on a banknote. He knows she's too greedy to destroy it, so the story revolves around how he can get the note back before his racing career is ruined. This is a pleasant lightweight movie, though you probably should know something about English society and/or horse-racing to really understand what's going on. Wallace's biographer Margaret Lane describes THE CALENDAR as "undoubtedly one of Wallace's best plays, for on this ingenious plot he built a structure of authentic and amusing racing detail and provided the incomparable Gordon Harker with another made-to-measure part in a character of a burglar turned butler." Wallace, incidentally, later went to Hollywood and was working on the script of KING KONG when he died.

Racing was Edgar Wallace's first love and as an owner, tipster, gambler writer and journalist he mixed with everyone connected with the sport from the highest to the lowest. THE CALENDAR, referring to the Racing Calendar, was one of his most successful plays which even recently has been described as the best play about racing ever written.

Geoffrey Kerr's screenplay loses some of the tension but accentuates the more amusing side of the story to congenial effect. One or two references to coupons and rationing to reflect the austere world of 1948 can't really disguise the play's origins in the 1920's though. The casting is excellent with the glamorous Greta Gynt as the capricious Lady Wenda gaining a large share of the contemporary publicity arrayed in a number of exotic hats. Hard to understand why Sonia Holm did not become a star as she always impressed as intelligent and very attractive, yet her career ended abruptly a few tears later and she died aged only 52 in 1974. Leslie Dwyer makes the most of Hillcott, the rascally butler and the type of amiable, working-class minor crook that was another speciality of Wallace's. John McCallum is fine in the lead and the role of the blustering idiotic Willie could have been designed for Raymond Lovell. Altogether THE CALENDAR is a minor but most entertaining example of the flowering of British cinema in the Forties.

When his favorite horse is put down, owner John McCallum gets drunk. He's almost broke, so he listens to valet Leslie Dwyer, and orders his jockey to throw the race the next day, to put up the odds at his race after that. He sends a telegram to his former fiancée, Greta Gynt, to cancel her bet. The next morning, sober, he reverses all his instructions. His horse comes in second, but the track stewards have his telegram and demand an explanation. Miss Gynt refuses to admit receiving word that it was a drunken jest. The stewards, sympathetic, put McCallum on notice of further investigation and order the horse struck from the day's race. This means that McCallum is broke.

This is an amusing remake of the 1931 movie BACHELOR'S FOLLY, which seems from the description to have been told from the valet's point of view. Racing elements aside, it is a comedy, with Leslie Dwyer giving a fine performance as the ex-convict valet, and everyone liking McCallum very much, except for mercenary Miss Gynt, and stuffed-shirt steward Felix Aylmar. It's an odd take on the sort of upper-class comedy that still seems to be popular in British shows.

A drama based on an old play by Edgar Wallace. It understandably feels old-fashioned due to the age of the source material and must have felt so in comparison to the likes of BRIGHTON ROCK showing at the cinema. However, the plot is sufficiently complex to fill the running time, and the cast is a solid one. A story of a scam at the races, the fallout and subsequent character work that follows.

John McCallum ("Capt. Gary Anson") is a bit of a cove. He likes his good living, women and horses. When an expected inheritance doesn't materialise, he loses the girl and the money - but still as his horses, and a potential winner at that. Unfortunately for him, he gets a bit pickled one evening and decides to be a bit clever - causing suspicion to be laid at his door that there has been some race fixing going on. The ensuing investigation pits him against his former love (Greta Gynt - who has appropriated a £20,000 set of pearls from him) and her new, buffoon, husband "Lord Panniford" (Raymond Lovell) and it all boils down to a one hundred pound note. It's a throwaway little story but some decent writing from Geoffrey Kerr and lively characterisations from McCallum as well as a suitably venal Gynt and Leslie Dwyer as his street-wise batman "Hillcott' help to keep it moving along sharpishly. It's a touch too long, the jokes becomes a bit stretched, but it's still worth a watch if you like the cut and thrust of the horse racing world.