No Lady

Contrary to the previous review Lupino Lane was very much a film star.He made 76 films,the majority in Hollywood.He appeared in The Love Parade for Ernst Lubitsch.He gave up making films because he preferred the stage.In 1939 he scored his biggest ever hit with Me and My Girl.The first 16 minutes are quite funny.Lane with domestic strife with his wife and stepchildren.The scene then switches to Blackpool,where there is a lot of location shooting,a lot of it shot silent.The rather silly plot involving Sari Maitza then comes into play.However the best parts of this film are the silent sections where clearly his expertise as a silent screen performer and director came into play.There is a sequence where he is on a folder which is as poor a process as you will ever see.

Henpecked Lupino Lane, Lola Hunt, and his five stepchildren go on a holiday to Blackpool. There, he is mistaken for a spy from Ptomania, whose associates plan to crash the British glider in the competition, winning fifty-thousand-pound prize for Ptomania.

It's all an excuse for long sequences shot wild -- that is, without sound -- in which Lane performs his amazing acrobatics and slapstick routines around the holiday town. Those sequences are quite good, but the cheapness of the production, the poor sound track, and the slapdash writing don't make this particularly good. It reminds me of the proposition that Buster Keaton made to the higher-ups at MGM, to make silent films with talking sequences. I expect the scenarios would have been better than this mishmosh of sequences from THE ADVENTURER, cross-dressing, and puns. Still, it's always fun to see Lane run up a wall. With Sari Maritza and Wallace Lupino.

Just watched No Lady on Talking Pictures and I must confess that I enjoyed it. True the story is silly but the film was far better than I expected. There was little evidence that it was made just four years into the talkies and Lupino Lane was a superb acrobatic comedian. This production did him justice.

"Pog" (Lupino Lane) is the rather hen-pecked patriarch of a family who heads off to the seaside with his wife and offspring for their annual summer holiday. Once there, he is mistaken for a criminal mastermind and is soon embroiled in the nefarious activities of a gang of spies and crooks. Can he extricate himself from their dastardly schemes? Essentially, this is vehicle for a stage and silent film star who looks completely ill-at-ease in front of a camera into which, this time, he is expected to speak. The drama itself is the thinnest and the familial malarkey with wife (Lola Hunt) and the celebration of Britons on deckchairs wearing bowler hats eating ice cream comes across more scathing than ridiculous. There's some room for a bit of uncomplicated drag, and even some aeronautical antics at the end but this is really only watchable now as a curio of what we watched almost a century ago, what made us laugh and who tickled our fancy.

The movie itself is really only about a 5, but for me, when Lupino Lane really gets going, he can do no wrong.

For several years now, I have found myself bored to death over movies that are directed to be more concerned with presenting their "story" than with what they DO with the narrative. Most movies are written by a bunch of hack writers anyway, and few stories have any depth or value to them that can keep me engaged. RATHER, I am interested in any movie that allows truly talented actors to show off their skills.

Now it turns out that Lupino Lane is as good an acrobat as Buster Keaton, and probably as good a pantomimist and dancer as Chaplin or Lloyd. So here I am delighted to find a featurette that really displays his talents—and in a talking picture while the actor is still at his prime, no less.

Not that it couldn't have been even better, but... you can't have everything (although I'll never know why).

Fortunately, there is enough innocent silliness, cartoonishness, pantomime, acrobatics and else at play here, and briskly moving along at a pace to keep my interest.

If you don't know Lupino Lane, you might want to start with a wonderful compilation of clips from his movies, with super music, on the DVD "SlapHappy: Vol 1 (3 Funnymen...)".

If you find those clips amazing, astounding and hilarious, then you should try out some complete silents. After that, if you, like I, cannot possibly get too much Lupino Lane, then you should check out this movie (you can buy it at Amazon UK).