Jim l'excentrique

Jim (Robert Montgomery) is an artist and his father (Frank Morgan) a real lady's man. When the father falls for a rich society woman, her family turns out to be very snooty and condescending. Jim is infuriated and responds by creating a series of cartoons lampooning these jerks--and the series becomes VERY popular. However, when Jim meets Ann, he's smitten by her and is then shocked to learn she's from this same snooty family. So, Jim decides to stop doing these wildly popular cartoons and intends to keep his profession from Ann. To do so, he makes up a wild pack of lies...and has his butler (Eric Blore) pose as his father since they already dislike Jim's real father since the father is JUST an actor! Will Jim be able to keep this secret from Ann forever? And, if she learns, what will happen to their relationship? And why does Father show up...in disguise and with a thick German accent?!

In many ways, this film must have inspired the wonderful Errol Flynn film "Footsteps in the Dark". In this other film, Flynn lampoons society with his stories and all of these rich swells hate him...not realizing he's one of them himself! Both films are quite clever and worth seeing. Goofy, fun and the sort of movie they unfortunately don't make any more.

I am becoming a Robert Montgomery fan as I see more of his movies. As an actor who made most of his films in the 30's he is largely forgotten today compared with actors who kept making films into the fifties like Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. However he is a fine natural actor, a very good comedian and an altogether charming leading man. His specialty is the warm-hearted, well-mannered and slightly tipsy gentleman in evening clothes and he doesn't disappoint in this film. He pursues the girl with an admirable single-mindedness and belief in the inevitability of her eventual reciprocation.

The film has other pleasures, most notably the presence of Eric Blore as the gentleman's gentleman. This delightful actor is one of the great funny-men of this era. Also in fine form are Frank Morgan, as the ham actor who impersonates a Hungarian Count, Cora Witherspoon as an overbearing society woman, Billy Burke, Grant Mitchell and Robert Benchley as, what else, a lush. Truly a smorgasbord of character acting.

The plot is interesting enough to hold our attention and the little snippets of caricature and thirties-style newspaper comic strip are fun.

The only slight disappointment is Madge Evans as the ingénue, who plays it straight and is no match for the sublime Montgomery. All in all an enjoyable interlude.

How on earth could one not enjoy a screwball comedy like "Piccadilly Jim?" Directing a nimble cast that included Robert Montgomery, Eric Blore, Billie Burke, Cora Witherspoon, Robert Benchley and Frank Morgan, Robert Z. Leonard kept this '36 movie popping merrily along, stirring up mayhem of one kind or another and garnering plenty of laughter along the way. Yes, okay, it's dated, and one can see the denouement coming a long way off, but -- despite its predictable nature -- the film has a satisfyingly madcap flavor that can only from the comic timing and talent of the team of acting pros assembled here. Veteran Eric Blore (playing yet another of his seemingly unlimited roster of butlers) steals every scene he is in. P.G. Wodehouse wrote the story on which the movie is based and -- for once -- none of the multitude of writers and re-writers hired by the studio for screenplay adaptation purposes managed to deflate Wodehouse's airy insouciance. It's a small gem of a movie and one too infrequently seen. Nab it!

P.G. Wodehouse is best remembered for his creation of the unflappable butler Jeeves in those Bertie Wooster stories. In Piccadilly Jim, Wodehouse creates another butler character Bayliss here played by the slightly more flappable Eric Blore who does save the situation for his employer Robert Montgomery the notorious London cartoonist Piccadilly Jim. Of course not quite in the way he intended.

Piccadilly Jim is your very typical Wodehouse story, a comedy of manners and satire of the upper and middle classes. In this one however we Americans get a bit of a going over for our pretensions and crass commercialism in the persons of the Pett family.

With whom Montgomery and his father Frank Morgan get involved, Montgomery in an effort to help Morgan. It seems as though Frank would like to settle down and marry Billie Burke, but the grande dame of the family, aunt Cora Witherspoon won't hear of it. Montgomery dives into the situation and romances sister Madge Evans who is about to marry a title in the person of dull and dishwater Ralph Forbes. But his instincts as a cartoonist take over and he finds a lot of material for satire in the doings of the Pett family. So much so that they feel they have to leave London where they are vacationing and had back across the pond. Of course Montgomery, Morgan, and Blore follow along on the same ocean liner.

One thing about Piccadilly Jim is that it is so perfectly cast. Just the names of the cast and the roles described and you know exactly what you are in for. This film is a great example of the studio contract system at its best, the studio had all or most of these people under contract to MGM and they just got dropped into roles perfectly suited to the image that MGM had created for them.

Robert Montgomery though American with his stage training and diction fits right into a Wodehouse English role without missing a beat. And Wodehouse's wit and eye for characters and caricature is as sharp as ever. Piccadilly Jim holds up remarkably well after over 70 years and the film is a great introduction to P.G. Wodehouse.

When one reads Wodehouse novels and short stories one is in a world of gentlemen's clubs, social lion aunts and tyrannical mothers, henpecked husbands, merchants who are overly proud of their products (in one short story the rich uncle deals in jute and has a house decorated in models of birds made out of his product), would-be dictators of England who have family fortunes based on woman's lingerie, Earls who are more concerned about prize winning pigs than propriety, bartenders who have funds of stories to illustrate life with, butlers who are smarter than the aristocrats around them, idiot scions of noble houses who convince their potential in-laws of their good intentions by swallowing dog biscuits (which the in-laws manufacture), brilliant social tacticians whose schemes always come apart at the end, and golf lovers - always golf lovers. You rarely find a comment on the real world - the nobleman who made money from ladies underwear was an exception (a satire on Sir Oswald Mosley). But his variations on the artificial world of the rich and the powerful works a charm to this day. Unlike so many of his contemporary fellow novelists his works are still largely in print (mostly through the British publisher Penguin). And Wodehouse wrote over 100 books!

It is a great formula, but it can be spoiled. Arthur Treacher played Jeeves, the great butler, in two forgettable comedies in the 1930s (one with David Niven as Bertie Wooster) did not make a great impression due to poor productions. But a film like A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS or this version of PICADILLY JIM shows how it's done properly. The characters are not arch or overdone - but they all take themselves seriously. Montgomery is a night person, enjoying the nightclubs and such. But he does remember to have a caricature ready for his newspaper, folded in the pocket of his coat. Eric Blore is the perfect butler, trying to awaken his employer using bird calls (a talent he would also display with amusing results in IT'S LOVE I'M AFTER). But he is intelligent and loyal. When Cora Witherspoon's Mrs. Pett makes a sneering comment on Jim's formidable abilities as a caricaturist (as opposed to a real artist like Leonardo or Raphael), Blore's butler Bayliss boils over and rattles off a list of great artists who were gifted caricaturists, such as Daumier and Thomas Nast, and ending with Goya. Frank Morgan has not performed on stage in 20 years, but he is proud of his greatest role - as Osric in Hamlet (Peter Cushing in the Olivier film, and Robin Williams in Keneth Branagh's version). He uses it (successfully) to fool the Petts into accepting him into their family, while he secretly romances Mrs. Pett's younger sister (Billie Burke - the only one who realizes the truth in the masquerade).

In Wodehouse the road to love is never easy. Robert Montgomery makes a successful comic strip out of the Pett family (Witherspoon, Grant Mitchell, and Tommy Bupp) in revenge for their snootiness (actually it is the snootiness of Witherspoon - she thinks Morgan is a fortune hunter, and Mitchell is her henpecked husband who goes along with her; the boy Ogden Pett is one of those obnoxious kids in Wodehouse who enliven his books - actually Ogden is thoughtless and rude, but he actually thinks it's cool that he's in a comic strip). Montgomery learns that Madge Blake, the woman he loves, is angry at the comic strip and it's artist. He has to try to undue the damage his successful strip has done to try to win Madge back.

The film is a sparkling little drink of champagne, which the best of Wodehouse usually is. It's nice to see that for a change, Hollywood got the literary property's spirit right.