Stormy Weather

"Stormy Weather" is the story of a British couple who are happy...though not together. Mrs. Craggs is an annoying and dopey woman who cheats on her husband with a variety of men. While you would think this would be a serious problem, Sir Duncan Craggs doesn't mind at all, as it gives him the excuse to have his own affairs...and with women who aren't so annoying nor vacuous.

When Sir Duncan is appointed to the board of directors of a department store chain, he takes the job seriously and works to make it more efficient. Through one of his on site visits, he makes the acquaintance of two managers...one efficient and a weasel and the other inefficient and also a weasel. Somehow all three men as well as Mrs. Craggs all get pulled into a weird adventure in Chinatown....how and what's in store for them is something you'll have to see for yourself.

This is a cute comedy of manners...and well worth seeing. I nearly scored this one an 8 and think it's well written and clever. The only problems with the film depend on how politically correct and how easily offended you are. As a retired history teacher, such things didn't surprise me and I don't think you can apply today's standards to films...otherwise you'll never watch much of anything. But there are a couple offensive racial/ethnic slurs in the film...so hold on tight as you watch!

This film is wonderful. Wacky, politically incorrect and more risque than you might expect from a movie from this era.

Tom Walls who plays Sir Duncan Craggs and also directed is a comic genius. Don't miss it.

Very much the Carry On films of the 1930s complete with enough double entendres to make Barbara Windsor blush. This isn't quite the best of the Aldwych farces but if you like a proper old style comedy or are just interested to see what made people laugh between the wars, you'll enjoy this.

We are conditioned to enjoy the familiar. Consequently a lot of us love classic 1930s comedy such as Laurel and Hardy, Will Hay and Marx Brothers This slightly more obscure and forgotten style of comedy takes a little while to get into but these professionally made, tried and tested pictures from "The Aldwych Gang" - which are funny - endear themselves quickly to us.

Tom Walls, the leader of the group and director of the films was immensely popular in the thirties but I am not sure he comes across as a likeable person. It might be just his screen persona but these days he seems a little arrogant and unpleasant. As someone doing a 1930s Sid James, some degree of likeability feels necessary. It's difficult to root for someone you don't like.

I've mentioned that these were the Carry On films of the day and that Tom Walls was their version of Sid James. There are two other similar roles: Ralph Lynn, the silly toff makes a fabulous Kenneth Williams and Yvonne Arnaud, the sex starved matron is Joan Sims. Then there's the hilarious Robertson Hare is....well he's just unique - my new comedy hero!

So if you fancy a silly story with people chasing along corridors running into the wrong bedrooms, losing their trousers and hiding strange women under their beds, give this a go.

Tom Walls has just taken over as Chairman of a chain store and is inspecting the branches. He is prepared to promote the dull but efficient Robertson Hare and fire the incompetent Ralph Lynn. He orders them both to London, where his wife, Yvonne Arnaud, has just discovered that her first husband, Andrews Englemann, whom she thought dead, is alive, has kidnapped her to a Chinese laundry and is about to blackmail Mr. Walls.

It's a prime example of Aldwych farce transferred to the screen with expert opening up and lots of racy and insulting lines written by Ben Travers and delivered by the stage veterans who spoke them on the boards. I cannot but help think that there was a good deal more racy behavior on stage than in this screen adaptation, the censors being tougher on screen than within the proscenium arch. However, there's plenty to delight in the delivery of this farceurs: Walls' smug delivery, Lynn's frantic incompetence, Hare uncomprehending dullard and Arnaud's French double-entendre double-takes.... and to offend any modern fifth-wave feminist audience.

This film features a racy plot and crackling dialogue. The two principal characters, Sir Duncan Craggs and his Franco-Russian wife Louise, have a free-wheeling morality in respect of extra-marital affairs, each fully cognisant of the other's infidelities, but tempering reproach with civilised restraint, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of a Lubitsch sex comedy.

Their upper-class hijinks spill over from the West End of town houses and night clubs to a Limehouse Chinese laundry which acts as a front for a disreputable doss-house, with suggestions that it might be an opium den and a haunt of prostitutes. The film neatly contrasts the two milieus by a change of visual style, with the seedy locales shot in murky soft focus.

Yvonne Arnaud is delicious as Craggs' wife Louise, fracturing the English language with every sentence she utters. Stella Moya, as a beautiful Chinese girl, has little to do, but is suitably alluring. Robertson Hare's role is smaller than those of the other three leads, and he is well matched by Norma Varden as his domineering wife. (He does, however, get to lose his trousers at one point, a trademark feature of his.) A young Graham Moffatt, in an early role before joining the Will Hay team, makes the most of his single scene. The actresses playing the shop girls and secretaries in the early part of the film are all unbilled, undeservedly so.

The adaptation of the Aldwych farces to the screen was not always successful, but it is hard to fault this one.