What a fun film this is! A ripping yarn, a jolly jape, a spiffing tale of derring-do. It's a very silly film and the way it's presented in such a straight laced manner makes it all the funnier. It's essentially a good old 1930s murder mystery with the daftest motive ever in movie history. That motive is revealed in the opening scene, a flashback to a wonderfully unrealistic, village theatre company interpretation of 1780, a scene that is spookily re-enacted 150 years later by the same cast but now in modern dress.
The humour in places is so subtle that it's almost as if the film makers didn't care whether you got the joke as long as it amused themselves. It's such a far cry from some of the more commercially successful and usually very loud and shouty films from both sides of the Atlantic where the brash comedy is virtually forced down your throat. This features the unlikely pairing - but weirdly common in the mid-thirties, of grumpy old cockney Gordon Harker playing the most clichéd policemen you could imagine (and if you're wondering who he reminds you of, it's Lionel Jeffries) and England's very own answer to Joan Blondell, Binnie Hale. These two are clearly not Olivier and Vivien Leigh (or Blondell) but they're instantly likeable and have great sparkling chemistry together.
This is however a super-cheap picture so don't expect all the trimmings but despite it looking like it was made for just a couple of bob and the story written by your six year old nephew, it really is truly enjoyable and is incidentally, one of the best films I've seen which transports you back to 1930s - it's got a lovely warm, albeit amateurish feel to it. Sometimes a film can be so over-polished that there's no substance left to it. You don't need a Selznick, Gable or Shearer to make something entertaining. So who made this? Harcourt Templeman and Sinclair Hill, who sound more like railway stations than actual people created their own independent production company called Grosvenor Films in 1935 to make the films they wanted to make. By hiring out space at the big studios (this one was made at BIP), they produced seven pictures before the economic slump of 1937 hit the UK and halted their ambitions - it was fun while it lasted though.
The humour in places is so subtle that it's almost as if the film makers didn't care whether you got the joke as long as it amused themselves. It's such a far cry from some of the more commercially successful and usually very loud and shouty films from both sides of the Atlantic where the brash comedy is virtually forced down your throat. This features the unlikely pairing - but weirdly common in the mid-thirties, of grumpy old cockney Gordon Harker playing the most clichéd policemen you could imagine (and if you're wondering who he reminds you of, it's Lionel Jeffries) and England's very own answer to Joan Blondell, Binnie Hale. These two are clearly not Olivier and Vivien Leigh (or Blondell) but they're instantly likeable and have great sparkling chemistry together.
This is however a super-cheap picture so don't expect all the trimmings but despite it looking like it was made for just a couple of bob and the story written by your six year old nephew, it really is truly enjoyable and is incidentally, one of the best films I've seen which transports you back to 1930s - it's got a lovely warm, albeit amateurish feel to it. Sometimes a film can be so over-polished that there's no substance left to it. You don't need a Selznick, Gable or Shearer to make something entertaining. So who made this? Harcourt Templeman and Sinclair Hill, who sound more like railway stations than actual people created their own independent production company called Grosvenor Films in 1935 to make the films they wanted to make. By hiring out space at the big studios (this one was made at BIP), they produced seven pictures before the economic slump of 1937 hit the UK and halted their ambitions - it was fun while it lasted though.