Pot Luck *** (1936, Tom Walls, Ralph Lynn, Robertson Hare) – Classic Movie Review 10,695

Director Tom Walls’s 1936 British farce Pot Luck stars Tom Walls, Ralph Lynn, Robertson Hare, Diana Churchill, Gordon James and Martita Hunt, and is a spoof of detective plays and thrillers, with Walls playing the recently retired, big-headed Inspector Fitzpatrick.

Ben Travers writes a cinema original for the great Aldwych farce trio of Walls, Lynn and Hare, in another haunted house comedy to follow up the 1932 film of Thark. However Travers bases his screenplay in part very loosely on his 1930 stage play A Night Like This.

Perhaps there is more action and there are fewer laughs than with his direct theatre adaptations, but otherwise it is funny business as usual in this tale of two dithering ex-policemen (Walls, and Lynn as Reggie Bathbrick) pursuing the thieves of a gallery’s Chinese vase and discovering it in meek Mr Pye (Robertson Hare)’s spooky mansion, where the robbers are hiding out with their proceeds.

Travers puts more accent on daft jokes and broad humour and less on the horror elements in a deliciously fast-moving farce. Gordon James (Ralph Lynn’s real-life brother Sydney) amusingly reprises his sepulchral butler turn from Thark, though this time he is called Cream.

A Night Like This was the seventh in the series of 12 Aldwych farces, staged nearly continuously at the Aldwych Theatre, London, from 1923 to 1933, and the sixth written by Travers.

Also in the cast are Diana Churchill, Gordon James, Martita Hunt, J A O’Rorke, Sara Allgood, J H Roberts, Peter Gawthorne, H G Stoker, Sam Wilkinson, T Kirby, Charles Barrett, Cyril Smith, Louis Bradfield, Mervyn Johns and James Grey.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,695

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