Trivia

Directed by Michael Powell, Something Always Happens (1934) is one of 23 "quota quickies" he was hired to helm for Teddington Studios, all of which were typically one-hour features needed to satisfy a legal requirement that cinemas in England exhibit a certain quota of British movies.

The film's producer Irving Asher was an American who oversaw film production at Warner Brothers' British Studios. According to Powell in his autobiography, "A Life in Movies," Irving "had to make about 20 films a year to fulfill his British quota ... He went back to California each year with the head of his scenario department, raided the story department at Burbank and came back to Teddington with perhaps 50 scripts that had already been turned into films by those satanic mills and were already playing at Palaces and flea-pits all around the world, many of them with big stars like Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney. Everything was run like a machine at Burbank and the average length of a script was 80 pages ... All that Irving had to do was hand the script to his story department, who cut it down to 50 pages and handed it over to a director like me. This was how tight little dramas like my Crown v. Stevens (1936), or comedies like "Something Always Happens"... arrived on the British screen. I made six or seven of these for Irving, slotting them in between other assignments. Jerry [Jackson] and he, both young Americans both in the quota-quickie business, were good friends. They carved me up between them, dovetailing their schedules so that I could work for both of them."

The other actor of note in Something Always Happens (1934) is George Zucco, who plays the easily rattled proprietor of the Cafe de Paris, the restaurant where Middleton usually tricks the waiters into "paying" him for his meals there. Zucco would also relocate to America in 1935, first appearing on Broadway opposite Helen Hayes in "Victoria Regina" and then making his U.S. movie debut in Sinner Take All (1936). Today, he is best remembered as a horror film character actor, making memorable impressions in La mano de la momia (1940), El buitre humano (1943), La guarida de Frankenstein (1944) and many others.

This film had its U. S. television premiere on Turner Classic Movies on 17 September 2007 during TCM's festival of films made by Warner Brothers at Teddington Studios in the UK.

Even though the film is a romantic comedy, it does reflect England's social and economic challenges of the 1930's, such as unemployment and the homeless. Its romance reflects a favorite subject - marrying into a higher social class. This parallels many romances written by the British author Jane Austen.

Michael Powell would use Ian Hunter again in another Teddington feature, Lazybones (1935), in which the title character was similar to "Peter Middleton" in Something Always Happens (1934) - a rather unmotivated and lackadaisical character who is forced to prove himself by getting a respectable job and making a success of it. Hunter, like Powell, would soon move on to better opportunities but instead of remaining in England he followed former Teddington Studios' actors Errol Flynn and Patric Knowles to Hollywood where he made his U.S. film debut in Jalna (1935) for RKO and then became a contract player for Warner Bros., joining Flynn and Knowles in Las aventuras de Robin Hood (1938).