I Lived with You

I approached I LIVED WITH YOU with trepidation. While Novello had appeared in 16 silent films, where his beauty and ability to act with good direction stood him in good stead, from his RAT trilogy to his two films with the budding Alfred Hitchcock. Talkies, however, were a different ball game. He made only six. His second, THE PHANTOM FIEND, was a remake of his silent Hitchcock film, THE LODGER, and he was just awful, as was the film, over-acting and emoting all over the studio sets. His next, a turgid melodrama with Ruth Chatterton, ONCE A LADY, gave him only a brief supporting role in twelve scenes.

I LIVED WITH YOU is an adaptation of his own play, in which he starred on stage, and it is a revelation. Very funny, very well crafted, with great lines and astute observations of character and mood. Ursula Jeans is perfect as the good daughter, Gladys. Ida Lupino in her fifth film is unrecognizable, she is so fresh, minor her later mannerisms in voice and posture.

The whole cast is full of great character acting and in the middle is Novello, totally charming and totally believable as a romantic Russian prince whose involvement in the lives of a poor but happy British family, upsets their lives in many ways. Later films to use this idea of a stranger entering family lives and changing them for ever were mainly comic (MY MAN GODFREY, MERRILY WE LIVE), but often moving and thought-provoking (BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING).

Novello has lost all of his theatrical mannerisms and theatrical emoting. He is fresh, funny and ultimately very moving. Facial and vocal expressions are fit and apt to the sound film. I've never seen a better performance of his and the film is absolutely wonderful.

Seek it out!

At first glance when this came on TV I thought 'Ivor Novello, meh, probably some cheesy songs and dated, creaky humour'. But how wrong I was. The fast-paced dialogue and frenetic plotting are imbued with a casual but knowing wit that gives the piece an amazingly modern feel for a film made in 1933. Novello himself is the big surprise, there's real panache in the way he drives it all along from within his character's louche, offhand manner. The rest of the cast are well up for it, conveying the chaos caused by Novello's superficial and fickle (though fatally charismatic) character - an exotic stranger who quietly invades the suburban family home in which he becomes a temporary guest, heedless of the trail of disruption he leaves in his wake.

Despite the reservations one has to have when a Russian prince has a Welsh accent barely disguised and a character disappears after a couple of scenes (young Albert the son takes 10 shillings to place a deposit on a wireless and is never seen again), this film is really sweet and extremely funny. To those of us who are familiar with Novello as a composer of luscious melodies of the likes of We'll Gather Lilacs it shows a new side to his genius. Great fun, especially the ladies' tea party and the early scenes in Hampton Court Maze.

Ursula Jeans meets a very elegant, very Russian Ivor Novello. He's broke, so she takes him home to her family's middle-class house, until he gets back on his feet. That will be a problem, because he's a Russian prince, and so not fitted for anything. All he has is a few sets of jewels worth thousands of quids. Since they were gift from the late Tsar, he can't spend them on himself. He can spend them on his new family, whose settled, decent lives he turns topsy-turvy.

It's based on Novello's stage hit, and director Maurice Elvey does a fine job of opening it up, with a camera that moves, quick cuts, and close-ups. there are some wonderfully silly scenes, like the one where Novello gets the local snobs drunk on vodka-laced tea. Yet the serious segments are curiously at odds with the crazy-comic ones; they are two sets of stage conventions that do not mix well.

It's a bit odd to see this out of Twickenham. That production company had been built on a series of quota quickies, subsidized by American companies who needed British production to play alongside their imported movies to comply with British law. the larger British integrated studios found the small studio useful for providing cheap second features to run in their big houses. the problem was that owner Julius Hagen had grown weary of the thin profit margins, and aware of the immense profits from A productions. So he cut back on the bread-and-butter productions and tried for prestige... and found himself shut out by the big, integrated companies, in Britain and the U.S.

Ivor Novello was a composer, musician, playwright, screenwriter, theatre actor/producer ....and... as this shows, a genuinely funny comedy actor too. He wrote this as well confirming what a talented, witty and insightful writer he was.

First of all, as a few others have said - what a surprise to find how funny he is. This is not what you'd expect from Ivor Novello. His very Welsh Russian accent is hilarious. His style is campy fabulosa - like a 1930s Kenneth Williams. Were he around today he'd have a weekly prime time tv slot. Like the best writers, he shares out to all of his cast equal funny lines and equal opportunities to shine. It's very democratic inasmuch that all the main cast have about the same amount of screen time and all have properly developed characters.

Another surprise is what a well made film this is. It's produced, directed and acted much better than a lot of films from 1933. The reason for its high quality is due to a guy called Julius Hagen, an incredibly ambitious German emigre who for a short time ran his own British film studio, Twickenham Studios. Two things now happened at the same time. 1. The Depression in America resulted in the American studios cutting production so they needed to outsource films to fill their cinemas. 2. Noticing that Korda at London Films made a fortune with his big budget HENRY VIII, Hagen thought he'd do the same. So in 1933 when UA needed product for the cinemas he abandoned churning out cheap 'quota quickies' and invested heavily into making a few high quality films like this. There weren't too many English films in 1933 made this well so this is something quite special which is what makes it still so entertaining today.

It's instantly engaging, intelligent and great fun. It's not the typical silly slapstick nonsense that was popular at the time but neither is it a high-brow, pretentious bore. In fact , it's got as many one-liners and subtle innuendos as you'd find in any Carry On film thirty years later. And one last observation - Ida Lupino sure was pretty!