The Calendar

A drama based on an old play by Edgar Wallace. It understandably feels old-fashioned due to the age of the source material and must have felt so in comparison to the likes of BRIGHTON ROCK showing at the cinema. However, the plot is sufficiently complex to fill the running time, and the cast is a solid one. A story of a scam at the races, the fallout and subsequent character work that follows.

This is actually based on a play by Edgar Wallace, the famous British thriller author who divided his time equally between writing and going to the track; not surprisingly a few of his novels have a racing background. This story isn't actually much of a thriller as such, although it does have some crime content. Our hero (John McCallum) has sent an important message to his gold-digging girlfriend written on a banknote. He knows she's too greedy to destroy it, so the story revolves around how he can get the note back before his racing career is ruined. This is a pleasant lightweight movie, though you probably should know something about English society and/or horse-racing to really understand what's going on. Wallace's biographer Margaret Lane describes THE CALENDAR as "undoubtedly one of Wallace's best plays, for on this ingenious plot he built a structure of authentic and amusing racing detail and provided the incomparable Gordon Harker with another made-to-measure part in a character of a burglar turned butler." Wallace, incidentally, later went to Hollywood and was working on the script of KING KONG when he died.

When his favorite horse is put down, owner John McCallum gets drunk. He's almost broke, so he listens to valet Leslie Dwyer, and orders his jockey to throw the race the next day, to put up the odds at his race after that. He sends a telegram to his former fiancée, Greta Gynt, to cancel her bet. The next morning, sober, he reverses all his instructions. His horse comes in second, but the track stewards have his telegram and demand an explanation. Miss Gynt refuses to admit receiving word that it was a drunken jest. The stewards, sympathetic, put McCallum on notice of further investigation and order the horse struck from the day's race. This means that McCallum is broke.

This is an amusing remake of the 1931 movie BACHELOR'S FOLLY, which seems from the description to have been told from the valet's point of view. Racing elements aside, it is a comedy, with Leslie Dwyer giving a fine performance as the ex-convict valet, and everyone liking McCallum very much, except for mercenary Miss Gynt, and stuffed-shirt steward Felix Aylmar. It's an odd take on the sort of upper-class comedy that still seems to be popular in British shows.

Racing was Edgar Wallace's first love and as an owner, tipster, gambler writer and journalist he mixed with everyone connected with the sport from the highest to the lowest. THE CALENDAR, referring to the Racing Calendar, was one of his most successful plays which even recently has been described as the best play about racing ever written.

Geoffrey Kerr's screenplay loses some of the tension but accentuates the more amusing side of the story to congenial effect. One or two references to coupons and rationing to reflect the austere world of 1948 can't really disguise the play's origins in the 1920's though. The casting is excellent with the glamorous Greta Gynt as the capricious Lady Wenda gaining a large share of the contemporary publicity arrayed in a number of exotic hats. Hard to understand why Sonia Holm did not become a star as she always impressed as intelligent and very attractive, yet her career ended abruptly a few tears later and she died aged only 52 in 1974. Leslie Dwyer makes the most of Hillcott, the rascally butler and the type of amiable, working-class minor crook that was another speciality of Wallace's. John McCallum is fine in the lead and the role of the blustering idiotic Willie could have been designed for Raymond Lovell. Altogether THE CALENDAR is a minor but most entertaining example of the flowering of British cinema in the Forties.

Yes I drooled over the raven haired Sonia Holm who played Mollie the heroine of this movie who ends up with the man she loves in this movie -handsome Australian actor John McCallum, (real life husband of Googie Withers).Edgar Wallace the mystery writer who wrote "The Calendar" (1948), liked to combine writing with going to the races so this story had an authentic ring of truth to it and held my attention to the end.Raymond Lovell always had difficulty pronouncing his "Rs" which ofter came out as a "W" sound which a good speech therapist could have rectified.If you like gentle British 1940s comedies with a horse racing background, this is an entertaining movie.