Charming as ever, Colman virtually carries the film on his own suave shoulders. True, 18-year-old Loretta Young appears less starry-eyed and more animated than usual. She's still inclined to over-act, but sharp film editing disguises this excess. Myrna Loy has an attractively sizable role with lots of close-ups, plus the opportunity to model some clinging clothes. David Torrence is suitably insinuating as the "knowing" manufacturer. In her screen debut, Florence Britton makes the hero's sister both capable and cute. Paul Cavanagh has a typical characterization, though he is forced to struggle with a Russian accent. Best of all Colman's comrades, Frederic Kerr puts across a memorable impression of curmudgeonly sympathy. His is a role that in lesser hands would have been interpreted merely as a stock drawing-room caricature. Kerr gives the portrait life and feeling. Yes, the script is slight, but it's so ingratiatingly played all around, even the most critical audience will find it fairly amusing. And it's great to hear all these British accents.
Looking more critically at the direction and the photography: Although the camera occasionally moves freely, it's more often stationary. An illusion of movement is often achieved by deft film editing. For me, however, no amount of clever cutting can disguise the fact that the film's nucleus is simply a photographed stage play. In the 2008 VHS print under review, the lab has made some commendably successful efforts to give the original's once smoky interiors a harder, glossier, more contrasty look, so that the images no longer have that soft-edged, coarse-grained pallor (a diffusion caused by shooting through a double-glazed window in a sound-proof booth so that the noise of the camera wouldn't be picked up by the microphone) associated with the early sound film. (Many fans feel that diffusion gives films a primitive, "museum" look, but some cinematographers used this effect right into the 1960s).
Looking more critically at the direction and the photography: Although the camera occasionally moves freely, it's more often stationary. An illusion of movement is often achieved by deft film editing. For me, however, no amount of clever cutting can disguise the fact that the film's nucleus is simply a photographed stage play. In the 2008 VHS print under review, the lab has made some commendably successful efforts to give the original's once smoky interiors a harder, glossier, more contrasty look, so that the images no longer have that soft-edged, coarse-grained pallor (a diffusion caused by shooting through a double-glazed window in a sound-proof booth so that the noise of the camera wouldn't be picked up by the microphone) associated with the early sound film. (Many fans feel that diffusion gives films a primitive, "museum" look, but some cinematographers used this effect right into the 1960s).