Return to Yesterday

The basic premise of this film is that Clive Brooks is a big Hollywood film star who has returned home for a brief spell .He wants to escape from the pressures of this(don't they all) and ends up in a seaside town where he began his career and decides to help out an end of pier theatre.Even if Brooks had been a star he was now past his sell by date,being 53 when he made this film.So rather an unlikely star.Brooks is his usual wooden self,and the fact that he appeared in such an insignificant film means that he must have accepted that his film career was wending to a close.It passes the team reasonably and its shortness means that it does not outstay its welcome.

One of the most charming light comedies to come out of Ealing, and Robert Stevenson's last British film before his flight to Hollywood, 'Return to Yesterday'is a veritable treasure trove of British character actors of the period (including Frank Pettingell, Dame May Witty, O.B. Clarence and Garry Marsh) all ably led by Clive Brook in one of his most sensitive screen performances, and one well up to the heights of his later triumph in 'On Approval'. The film also benefits, however, from a clever script (based on a play by Robert Morley), some nostalgic location shooting at Paddington station and on the GWR main line near Dawlish, and a delightful evocation of British seaside life in the last summer before war took hold. Stevenson's direction is characteristically deft and lends the movie a welcome air of spontaneity. Note, for instance, the last shot of O.B. Clarence and his reaction to being tickled from behind - with many directors, this would have ended up on the cutting room floor. Not so with Stevenson, and this film throughout is imbued with the same sense of fun which he brought to his better-known movies for Disney. Though its story of thwarted love is common enough, 'Return to Yesterday' simmers with a love of film and theatre - and the world which was about to be lost forever in the years of war and the privation which followed it. Call it sentimental if you will - but, once watched, this is a film you'll return to again and again.

The personality of Robert Morley is already amply in evidence in this breezy early Michael Balcon production adapted from his 1937 play 'My Goodness, How Sad', drawing upon a season he spent with Sir Frank Benson's company.

Already nostalgic when he wrote it, and doubly so when released in January 1940 evoking pre-war Britain; after over eighty years it now seems even more from another era.

Included as the first film in Volume 11 of the Ealing Studios Rarities Collection I came to this film with low expectations, which were very rapidly surpassed. From the very first scene, in which a young playwright whose first play is to be staged at a seaside theatre is taken down several pegs by the man posting the bill advertising it, the script is as beautifully polished as the accents of the leading characters, and the supporting cast is a delight. There's an enormous sense of fun about the film, though Clive Brook as the jaded British Hollywood star trying to rediscover the secret of his youthful happiness occasionally dampens the mood. Now eighty years old there is also oodles of period charm in various railway and seaside scenes.

If anything lets the film down it's the romantic element of the plot, which is not terribly believable, though I suppose one could make the same criticism of several Shakespeare plays, and whether it's plausible or not without it there would have been no way to set up some of the most entertaining scenes.

Thanks to a UK film channel I caught up with this good film. It shows many things. About how we age and try to accept it, about the UK just before WW2 and that wonderful experience of end of the pier theatre long since lost. Clive Brook is good as an ageing man falling in love with Anna Lee playing a very youthful actor in the theatre company. Most of the cast will be possibly unknown to the young of this century, but were valued in the first half of the 20th century, and that is a loss in itself, but as the title says you cannot return to yesterday. May Whitty is in the film who was so good in ' The Lady Vanishes ' directed by Alfred Hitchcock and she is excellent here giving Clive Brook some very wise advice about the young, and how ideally the young should be with each other. Well worth seeing for its clarity and its wisdom, and the underrated Robert Stevenson directed. Known for working with Disney, he made before that experience a few gems of cinema, and this is one of them.