" Those Were the Days ! " At the Regal
THIS British International production is adapted from Pinero's farce, The Magistrate, which dates from 1885. The film shifts the action into the 'nineties, presumably because the " naughty 'nineties " are supposed to be popular with the public, suggesting all sorts of wild dissipation. One effect of the change is to remove the story still further into the realm of caricature, for it is impossible to believe that people were behaving like this less than fifty years ago, when the first motor-cars were coming in.
Mr. Will Hay, well known to variety audiences and wireless listeners, makes his first screen appearance as Mr. Posket, the magistrate who inadvertently sentences his highly respect- able wife to a week in gaol. He has a neat style, but he would have a better chance in a broader part. He is supposed to be a pillar of society who masquerades as a reveller, but it is difficult not to feel that he is masquerading as a magistrate. Others in the cast include Iris Hoey, Angela Baddeley, Claud Allister and George Graves, but the best acting comes from Lawrence Hanray, seen all too briefly as the magistrate's clerk.
The period detail, elaborately and skilfully contrived, includes a full-scale music-hall performance, with imitations of Marie Lloyd, Little Tich, and other celebrities of the time. This is well done, but it lasts too long ; and it seems to me that the whole action, moving with resounding creaks from one coincidence to another, ought nowadays to be taken at a much more lively pace. But as a caricature of Victorian manners the film has a kind of nightmare fascination. Those were the days, it suggests, when gaiety was to be had only by bribing the butler to say nothing about it.
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