The Man from Yesterday ** (1932, Claudette Colbert, Clive Brook, Charles Boyer, Andy Devine, Alan Mowbray) – Classic Movie Review 13,435

The 1932 triangular romantic melodrama film The Man from Yesterday showcases the alluring three great stars Claudette Colbert, Clive Brook and Charles Boyer.

Director Berthold Viertel’s 1932 Paramount Pictures black and white romantic drama film The Man from Yesterday stars Claudette Colbert, Clive Brook and Charles Boyer, along with Andy Devine and Alan Mowbray. It is a faded relic of a bygone age, but with valiant performances to recommend it.

When Sylvia Suffolk (Claudette Colbert) and surgeon René Gaudin (Charles Boyer) decide to tie the knot they understandably don’t expect Colbert’s first husband Captain Tony Clyde (Clive Brook), hitherto supposed dead in World War One, to make a shell-shocked reappearance at the very hotel they are staying in. Sylva is now torn between duty to Tony and marriage to René.

The Man from Yesterday is a rather stilted, stagey triangular melodrama with a slushy, contrived script and some turgid dialogue by Oliver H P Garrett, though the alluring work of the three great stars and the sterling support of the fine characters actors make something of it, so that it is a just little bit more than merely bearable.

Karl Struss’s cinematography is attractive and Austrian screenwriter and film director Berthold Viertel does his level best to make this forgotten antique as appealing as possible. It is a blatant movie concoction and Viertel brings his sensitivity and charm to it, though ironically he wanted to produce socially relevant films, which he thought Hollywood was incapable of.

After this, Viertel worked in the UK: Little Friend (1934), The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935) and Rhodes of Africa (UK, 1936). Christopher Isherwood’s 1945 novel Prater Violet is a fictional version of the time he worked with Viertel on Little Friend.

Oliver H P Garrett based his script on a story by Neil Blackwell and Rowland G Edwards.

Release date: June 24, 1932.

The cast

The cast are Claudette Colbert as Sylvia Suffolk, Clive Brook as Captain Tony Clyde, Charles Boyer as René Gaudin, Andy Devine as Steve Hand, Alan Mowbray as Dr Waite, Greta Meyer as inn proprietress, Barbara Leonard as Steve’s girl, Yola d’Avril as Tony’s girl, Emile Chautard as priest, George Davis as taxi driver, Christian Rub as terrace waiter, Boyd Irwin, Donald Stuart, Reginald Pasch, Barbara Leonard, Frank Atkinson, Ronnie Cosby, Marie Donn, Dennis O’Keefe, and Barry Winton.

The Man from Yesterday is directed by Berthold Viertel, runs 71 minutes, is made and released by Paramount Pictures, is written by Oliver H P Garrett, is shot in black and white by Karl Struss, and is scored by Herman Hand, Rudolph G Kopp and John Leipold.

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,435

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