Rookery Nook [One Embarrassing Night] **** (1930, Ralph Lynn, Tom Walls, Winifred Shotter, Robertson Hare, Mary Brough) – Classic Movie Review 10,609

Sheet music for featured song tie-in with Rookery Nook (1930).

The hit series of film adaptations of the Aldwych Farces began with the big box office hit Rookery Nook in 1930 and ran throughout the Thirties. Rookery Nook was the first London theatre Aldwych farce, staged in 1926, and the first to be made into a talkie is also, deservedly, the best known. Director Tom Walls’s 1930 Rookery Nook [One Embarrassing Night] is farce at its subtle best, with a hilarious screenplay by the play’s author Ben Travers and W P Lipscombe.

A holidaying tired business man husband Gerald Popkiss (Ralph Lynn) goes to Rookery Nook in search of a rest cure for a few days and has a problem with the wife, mother-in-law and assorted pursuers when Rhoda (Winifred Shotter), a girl with blonde hair and silk pyjamas fleeing from her tyrannical stepfather, asks for help and her hides her. Fearing a scandal, Gerald gets his cousin Clive (Tom Walls) to help him conceal Rhoda.

Rookery Nook is a sharp, pacy and wonderful Ben Travers farce (maybe his finest) illuminated with the perfect original London Aldwych Theatre cast in Ralph Lynn, Tom Walls and Robertson Hare.

As cinema, it is theatrical and technically dodgy (poor soundtrack and little camera movement) since it was filmed soon after sound came in, but it is not a problem since the witty words and endearing performances speak for themselves.

Walls also directs, with an unexpected producer in Herbert Wilcox’s British and Dominions Film Corporation in association with His Master’s Voice (The Gramophone Company, later EMI). But HMV ended its association with British and Dominions in 1931 concerned that participation in producing comedy films such as Rookery Nook would demean its corporate image.

Also in the cast are Mary Brough as Mrs Leverett, Ethel Coleridge as Gertrude Twine, Griffith Humphreys as Putz, Margot Grahame as Clara Popkiss, and Doreen Bendix as Poppy Dickey.

Rookery Nook [One Embarrassing Night] runs 90 minutes, is made by Herbert Wilcox Productions, The Gramophone Company and British and Dominions Film Corporation, is released by Woolf & Freedman Film Service (1930) (UK) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1930) (US, is written by W P Lipscombe and Ben Travers, adapted from the play by Ben Travers, is shot in black and white by Bernard Knowles, William Shenton, David Kesson and Freddie Young, is produced by Herbert Wilcox and Byron Haskin (production supervisor), is scored by Carroll Gibbons (music arranger / musical director) and is designed by Clifford Pember.

It was released in London on 11 February 1930. It was the first film shown at Edinburgh’s art deco cinema The New Victoria, later the Odeon. The film opened there on 25 August 1930, the day Sean Connery was born a mile away.

It was made at British and Dominions Studios, Elstree, Hertfordshire, England.

The film largely uses the cast of the original stage production. Ralph Lynn, Tom Walls, Winifred Shotter, Mary Brough, Robertson Hare, Ethel Coleridge and Griffith Humphreys all created their roles in the original stage production.

This is how very successful at the box office it was. It cost £14,000 and earned £150,000 in the UK, setting off the series of filmed farces.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,609

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