One of a mere handful of established silent era stars to not only make the silent-to-sound transition intact, but to surpass earlier success, Ronald Colman may have been pushing 40 (not that you’d know it), but was blessed with one of the most memorable, sheerly beautifully voices around; that fading cadence, those Mid-Atlantic vowels. No other major star without an eccentric vocal delivery was more imitated. (And not only by impressionists for comic effect, a host of would-be Colmans, including the young Larry Olivier in his first Hollywood foray.) Colman was lucky in his Talkie debut, a light comic, amateur detective thriller, in having imaginative, well-paced direction by F. Richard Jones, a natural technician with a grounding in comic two-reelers who died of TB soon after this.* And Jones was similarly lucky, that is on the job, helped by the dashing visual glamor & artful shots of cinematographers George Barnes & Gregg Toland, plus William Cameron Menzies on production design. A strong UFA German Expressionist influence here, only occasionally dragged down by dead-weight Early Talkie staging. Nineteen-yr-old Joan Bennett makes a striking debut asking Drummond to find her missing uncle, while Montagu Love & Lilyan Tashman vamp nicely as suave villains. Grateful cineasts of the day pounced on a Talkie that didn’t stop for songs or love-making speeches, but still moved like a . . . well, like a movie.
Five years on, Nunnally Johnson used the earlier Sidney Howard script as template for Colman’s moderately pleasing return as the upperclass sleuth. Now the girl with the missing uncle & stolen document is Loretta Young. There’s another Lights-Out sequence; even a running gag about interrupted romance. In the first film, Drummond’s insufferable pal Algy keeps showing up at just the wrong moment. Here, the roles get reversed. Under Roy Del Ruth, it’s likeable and nicely peopled, but the early scenes with a disappearing body and a real London ‘pea-souper’ promise legit mystery before the film takes something of a ScrewBall curve. It doesn’t stand out from the 1934 crowd as the first film did in ‘29.
DOUBLE-BILL: *Many lost films on the F. Richard Jones’s CV, but happily Douglas Fairbanks’ next-to-last silent, THE GAUCHO/’27, with Doug’s most ambivalent hero, is nicely preserved.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: IMDb disses Colman on his page with a link to the wrong PRISONER OF ZENDA! Not his classic ‘37 beauty (with Madeleine Carroll & Douglas Fairbanks Jr), but the shot-for-shot TechniColor remake of 1952 with Stewart Granger. For shame!
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