"A Cup of Kindness." At the New Gallery HERE is
another of the Aldwych farces transferred with little apparent alteration to the screen. Mr. Toni Walls and Mr. Ralph Lynn are once more at the head of a cast which includes Mr. Robertson Hare, Mr. Claude Hulbert, and Miss Eva Moore ; and Miss Dorothy Hyson plays Miss Winifred Shotter's usual part as the girl, pretty and innocent, who is the cause of most of the misadventures.
These farces have made a lot of money in British cinemas, but I cannot so easily imagine them doing well abroad. Continental humour is subtler and more ironic ; American humour is more sardonic. The 'typical American wisecrack nearly always aims at "debunking" some popular illusion or some familiar social convention. In an Aldwych farce the characters seldom rise to this clear-sighted level ; the " debunking " is done by the author at their expense. A great many of the dialogue quips are the result of inadvertent rudeness—someone says what he is really feeling and hastens to cover up his mistake before the other person notices what has happened. It is by these very mistakes, however, that the chief characters are shown to be good fellows whose human instincts cannot help breaking through ; and the usual function of Mr. Robertson Hare is to emphasize their likeability by portraying the contrasting type of smug hypocrite whose efforts to suppress his natural instincts only serve to reveal him as a laughable fraud. There is not much difference between this imaginary world and an imaginary world of schoolboys and masters, with the school- boys scoring repeatedly off the masters ; and an essential feature of A Cup of Kindness, which will both promote and limit its popularity, is that it scarcely attempts to deal with
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