The Man Who Changed His Name

A garrulous, studio-bound sound remake of a 1928 Edgar Wallace potboiler with the cast throughout gathered together in little groups mugging furiously to the camera choppily cut together.

Despite musical director W.L.Trytel's name on the credits there is an almost funereal hush in the background throughout the proceedings until the thunderstorm shortly before the finale.

The fabulous wet-look thirties cocktail dress - even photographed in black & white obviously originally a bright colour - in which Betty Stockfield appears shortly before the halfway mark is sadly straight away returned to it's closet, never to be seen again.

It's pictures like this which give English films from the early thirties such a bad reputation. Saying that however it's not without some charm - it gives you a similar feeling of excitement to seeing your little one in the school play and relief that she managed to get through it without forgetting her lines. I did watch it all the way through though so it can't have been that bad.

Julius Hagen's Twickenham Studios did create a handful of excellent pictures (particularly those made by Bernard Vorhaus) but the main purpose of his studio was to make the quota quickies, screen fillers to satisfy the legal legislation to ensure that a certain proportion of films shown in the UK were made in the UK. Quality wasn't important, speed and cheapness were. They would often see how much film they had and work out how many scenes they could take with that length and make a movie sometimes in a day.

This one however does have quite a clever story but Henry Edwards is certainly no Alfred Hitchcock and his actors are certainly not actors. Not fair because they were working under absurd conditions and the titular Man Who Changed His Name himself was the headmaster in GOODBYE MR CHIPS so he must have been able to act give a proper script/director/budget/salary! Sometimes you start to watch a old film and it's so bad you can't continue. I didn't get that urge with this - there was some sort of residual primal energy or enthusiasm from 1934 still there which kept my attention. Oh my God, I'm starting to sound like I actually enjoyed this aren't I!

This British quickie adapts a lesser-known story by Edgar Wallace, one which had already been tackled twice in the 1920s. It's unusual for the author in that there isn't a string of murders taking place here, rather this is a comic mystery in which an adulteress and her lover become convinced that her husband is a murderer with designs on their lives.

It's actually a very funny and unusually-plotted film. There's a real sense of the macabre as the protagonists become caught up in their own endless nightmare from which there seems to be no escape. The film keeps you guessing to the very end, and makes fine use of limited locations so you don't really notice the lack of budget.

Although the loathsome protagonists are less than likable characters, Lyn Harding as the husband puts in an effective performance on which the whole film hangs. It can't have been easy to play it so ambiguously and he does very well, helping to make the film the success that it is. Wallace fans will lap this one up.