Plunder **** (1930, Ralph Lynn, Tom Walls, Winifred Shotter, Robertson Hare) – Classic Movie Review 10,696

The 1930 British comedy film Plunder is a smashing, fast-moving, high-spirited Ben Travers farce about upper-crust chums Freddie Malone and Darcy Tuck (Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn) who go gem stealing.

Director Tom Walls’s 1930 comedy Plunder is a smashing, fast-moving, high-spirited Ben Travers farce about upper-crust chums Freddie Malone and Darcy Tuck (Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn) who go gem stealing for honourable reasons when socialite Joan Hewlett (Winifred Shotter) is tricked over the inherited jewels by her swindling housekeeper, with farcical results.

Despite the basic filming and cost-cutting production, it is still an essential souvenir of the joyous 1920s originating London stage cast. It is easy and delightful to sit back and enjoy their wonderful playing together, unimpaired by the passing years, and appreciate Travers’s brilliant skills with clever plotting and witty lines.

Plunder is vintage British comedy at its most ingenious and delightful. Its 1990s London stage revival showed how the show has hardly aged at all, its wit and joie de vivre still 100 per cent intact.

Also in the cast are Robertson Hare as Oswald Veal, Doreen Bendix as Prudence Malone, Gordon James [Sydney Lynn] as Simon Veal, Ethel Coleridge as Mrs Orlock, Hubert Waring as Inspector Sibley, and Mary Brough as Mrs Hewlett.

It is made by British & Dominions Film Corporation at British and Dominion’s Elstree Studios.

Plunder is directed by Tom Walls, runs 98 minutes, is made by Herbert Wilcox Productions and British & Dominions Film Corporation, is distributed by Woolf and Freedman, is written by W P Lipscomb, shot in black and white by Freddie Young, produced by Herbert Wilcox, scored by Leo Kahn and designed by Lawrence P Williams.

It premiered in London on November 5, 1930, with a UK release on September 7, 1931.

It was remade for TV in 1957 as BBC Sunday-Night Theatre with Peter Gray and Brian Rix as Freddie Malone and Darcy Tuck, and again in 1970 with Arthur Lowe and Richard Briers as Freddie Malone and Darcy Tuck.

Tom Walls (18 February 1883 – 27 November 1949).

Plunder was first staged at the Aldwych Theatre, London, as the fifth in the series of 12 Aldwych farces presented by the actor-manager Tom Walls at the theatre between 1923 and 1933. The play opened on 26 June 1928 and ran for 344 performances. Most of the leading members of the stage cast reprised their roles in the film. Walls, Lynn, Hare, Brough, Shotter and James reprised their old stage roles.

It is the second in a series of film adaptations of Ben Travers Aldwych farces, and was a major hit, boosting Tom Walls as a star of British cinema.

In 1996 Kevin McNally and Griff Rhys Jones starred in a production of the play at the Savoy Theatre, directed by Peter James.

Tom Walls’s films as director: Tons of Money (1930), Rookery Nook (1930), On Approval (1930), Plunder (1931), A Night Like This (1932), Thark (1932), A Cuckoo in the Nest (1933), Turkey Time (1933), A Cup of Kindness (1934), Lady in Danger (1934), and Dirty Work (1934).

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,696

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Ralph Lynn, Gordon James and Tom Walls in Plunder (1928) on stage.