Busman’s Honeymoon [Haunted Honeymoon] *** (1940, Robert Montgomery, Constance Cummings, Leslie Banks, Seymour Hicks, Robert Newton, Googie Withers) – Classic Movie Review 6,286

The American theatrical release lobby card.

The deliciously charming and amusing 1940 British comedy thriller film Busman’s Honeymoon [Haunted Honeymoon] is based on Dorothy L Sayers’s co-authored London West End play.

Director Arthur B Woods’s deliciously charming and amusing 1940 British comedy thriller film Busman’s Honeymoon [Haunted Honeymoon] is based on Dorothy L Sayers’s co-authored London West End play Busman’s Honeymoon, which opened in London on 16 December 1936. Sayers later reworked the material into her 1937 novel Busman’s Honeymoon, her eleventh and last featuring her detective Lord Peter Wimsey and her fourth and last featuring Harriet Vane.

Robert Montgomery amuses smoothly as Dorothy L Sayers’s aristocratic amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who shares marital bliss and lots of lively banter with whodunit crime novel author Harriet Vane (Constance Cummings).

The MGM studio keeps Sayers’s complex murder plot – the newly wed couple are looking forward to a quiet honeymoon at their new country cottage when a body turns up in their Devon retreat – but mysteriously changes some of the main characters. Leslie Banks is steadfast as Inspector Andrew Kirk, the Scotland Yard copper on the case, and Seymour Hicks is notable as the resourceful butler Mervyn Bunter, while Aubrey Mallalieu plays the vicar, the Reverend Simon Goodacre, and James Carney the constable, Tom Sellon.

Also in the cast are Robert Newton as Frank Crutchley, Googie Withers as Polly, Frank Pettingell as the sweep William George Puffett, Joan Kemp-Welch as Aggie Twitterton, Roy Emerton as Noakes, Louise Hampton as Mrs Doris Ruddle, Eliot Makeham as Simpson, Reginald Purdell as MacBride, Allan Whittaker as the Doctor and Ben Williams as the town inspector.

The screenplay by Monckton Hoffe, Angus MacPhail and Harold Goldman is based on Dorothy L Sayers’s and Muriel St Clare Byrne’s play and the novel version by Sayers.

It is shot in black and white by Freddie Young, is produced by Harold Huth, and is scored by Louis Levy.

It premiered as Busman’s Honeymoon in London in July 1940 and was released in the US as Haunted Honeymoon in September 1940. There was understandable antipathy in the UK to Americans playing the very British sleuths, though they both perform well and sound English. The main Brits – Banks, Newton, Hicks and Withers – steal the show though.

Robert Donat quit the film at the last minute, and was replaced by Montgomery, who just happened to be in the UK at the time and available.

Original director Richard Thorpe started location work on 4 August 1939, but World War Two intervened in early September, and filming was delayed till Woods’s four-week shoot re-started on 21 March 1940 at Denham Studios and on location.

A busman’s holiday is one spent by a bus driver travelling on a bus, so anyone who spends their holiday doing their normal job – in this case honeymooners sleuthing – is taking a busman’s holiday.

Title apart, Haunted Honeymoon (1986) has no relation to this film.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 6,286

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The 1937 first edition of Busman’s Holiday.