In a Monastery Garden

This is not so much a menage a trios as a menage of four.The leading lady being engaged to a prince and then becoming romantically involved with a young looking John Stuart and a very youthful Hugh WilliaMS.Also on view are Allen Napier before he went to Hollywood and Frank Petingell playing an Italian with a Lancashire accent.All the devices that you would expect from a Quota Quikie are there.Hugh Williams is supposed to be conducting his symphony.However what we see is him in an adjacent room with an open door so that we can hear the orchestra playing over the soundtrack.We never get to see the orchestra.There is a brief extract from Swan Lake which is performed by 6 ballerinas in an area the size of a bathroom.This film is so bad it is actually entertaining.

Seemingly low budget film is oddly compelling. Main plot seems to be about rival brothers vying for the hand of a woman already engaged to a foreign prince. The brothers are also competitive music composers. Honor and truth are key attributes here. One brother is wrongly convicted and imprisoned for murder; the other seems to be a successful composer but he's stolen the music from the imprisoned brother. After many years, the imprisoned brother is freed. How will honor and truth come out? Hugh Williams and John Stuart are the Ferrier brothers, Joan Maude is cast as Roma Romano. Alan Napier is Count Romano. Dino Galvani is the prince. Best of all is Gina Malo as the deranged and distraught ballerina who has two memorable scenes. One is in a badly underlit cafe were she rants about unrequited love; the other is in the preposterous ballet scene where she dances Swan Lake.

Despite the exotic name, Malo was born Janet Flynn in Cincinnati but did most of her film work in England. The only other film I've seen her in is GOOD NIGHT, VIENNA with Jack Buchanan and Anna Neagle.

The ending of this film is rather surprising and makes it all worth while.