david-frieze

It's the depths of the Great Depression, and everyone in this film is either very poor or very rich (except for the couple who used to be very rich and are now very poor). A playwright and a songwriter are trying to sell their show; an attractive young woman is trying to get an acting job. A misunderstanding brings them together. The humor is very fast, if not very funny. Most of the songs in this musical show up in the second half; the title song is catchy, and the finale is energetic, if bizarre, but the rest of the music is forgettable. Star/writer/producer Stanley Lupino (father of Ida) is a decent broad comedian, but not much of a singer or a dancer. Sally Gray, who became a big star later in her career, had great legs and a serviceable voice but, at this stage of her career anyway, wasn't much of an actress. I'd recommend the last big dance number, which seems to sweep through most of London - it's very surreal and very entertaining.

"Mr. Cohen Takes a Walk" (renamed "Father Takes a Walk" apparently for parts of the world where movies about Jews wouldn't play well) is an unexpectedly warm little film from the English studio that Warner Brothers set up in the 1930s. Mr. Cohen, the founding owner of the Empire Department Store in London, finds that his sons have modernized the store to the point where he has virtually nothing to do. After a domestic tragedy and a quarrel with the son who doesn't want to marry the woman his parents picked for him, Mr. Cohen decides to go for a long in the countryside where, as a wandering peddler, he sowed the seeds for his future success. There are no villains; there's no overt preachiness. There is, however, a wonderfully nostalgic and idealized vision of English village life and an English countryside that even then were undergoing major changes, not least from the ravages of the Great Depression. The acting is uniformly excellent, particularly that of the German refugee Paul Graetz as Mr. Cohen, an aging gentleman (and gentle man) who wonders if he has a place in the modern world. I saw this on Turner Classic Movies a year or two ago when they aired a number of Warner Brothers "Quota Quickies" (films made cheaply and rapidly in response to a British law that a certain percentage of films shown in the United Kingdom be made in the United Kingdom); the film deserves a DVD.