This movie is based on a successful West End musical comedy starring Stanley Lupino, and the cast appears to be drawn from the show, with the added bonus, for fans of old movies, of having been directed by Lupino's cousin, Lupino Lane. While I wished to enjoy the movie, it soon betrayed its origins to such an extent that it fell apart, except as a collection of comedy bits, stretched slightly by probably having more sets than could be managed on the stage. Lupino's athletic tomfoolery (the family had been circus clowns for centuries) is downplayed a bit by being doubled in his gags by stooge Jack Hobbs. There are all the standard bits that lovers of ur-musicals will expect, like the fake opera number, the constant confusion of characters for others (Dorothy Bartlam is passed off as Lupino's sister and wife, as Hobbs' fiancee, all in perfectly wide-eyed acceptance), overactive mugging, and so forth.
Had this been offered as a straight reproduction of the stage show, it might have been more interesting, but its attempts to be a movie and to keep all the stage bits struggle with each other.
Lupino would return to the silver screen to better effect, but he had been a West End star for a dozen years at this point, and thither he would return, despite filmings of his stage successes through the end of the decade. Eventually his cousin would return to the stage to star for decades in ME AND MY GIRL. As for this movie, it illustrates the truism that cinema and the stage are two different media, and they require more careful translations from one to the other than this one shows.
