Michael Powell changes production companies and makes his first surviving musical, a fun and amusing, almost delightful, comedy of manners that uses the ideas of class as jumping grounds for light comedy and no more. Satirical in intent but musical in execution, His Lordship feels like a Lubitsch homage, especially Love Parade, his first musical, and Powell pulls it off quite well.
Bert Gibbs (Jerry Verno) is a plumber by trade by holds possession of a peerage making him the Right Honorable Lord Thornheath. It was a title granted to his father for decades of loyal service, an honor that killed him because it was a betrayal of his working class roots. It's also a title that Bert shuns because he's walking out with a girl, Lenina (Polly Ward), who's dedicated to the socialist cause, our opening scene watching as Bert agrees to join the Legion of Liberty headed by two conmen, Comrade Curzon (Michael Hogan) and Comrade Howard (V. C. Clinton-Baddeley), but it's really only for the girl. He's presented with a path to wealth when the movie star Ilya (Jante McGrew) tracks him down through her ex-husband and publicist, Washington Roosevelt Lincoln (Ben Welden), looking for any lord to marry for some publicity.
So, this is essentially a pro-English, pro-working class musical comedy where Bert navigates the Russian conmen (who have a number singing to each other about how corrupt they are) and the American movie star to keep his innocence and honor. It's all presented through this lightly comic tone done to a fair bit of perfectly acceptable musical numbers with Verno at the center of most of it.
For a film that's so short (just over an hour) and so much going on, it's actually somewhat impressive that we never really feel like anything is getting a major short shrift. It helps that it's a comedy so our two Russian comrades who insist that they're not foreign but born in England despite their outrageous accents not feeling like much more than caricatures can work as long as they entertain. And that's really what they are: caricatures of a critique against communist revolutionaries in England at the time, begging for and obsessed with money while advocating for a classless society without it while outright admitting to themselves that they just make everything up. It works in the context of pitting Bert in the middle of the socialists and the capitalists to reach for the basic humanity of his situation (in song).
The other side of the coin, Ilya, is where the film spends most of the second half as Bert agrees to the situation after Lenina chucks him because she finds out about his hidden peerage, and he gets his whirlwind romance with the movie star. It's all done as one musical number sung by Lincoln, set in one room as a pliant set of reporters and photographers document the changes in clothes and backdrops, documenting their torrid romance that's playing out farcically before them including a fight in a nightclub with another suitor for Ilya and even a hunting trip to the Scottish highlands. Comedies are often built of moments, and the moments here are really quite fun.
And, of course, Bert maintains his good, common sense, down to earth yeomanry by backing out, winning Lenina back, and still getting paid for his trouble anyway. It's not a challenging work. It doesn't have anything much to say about the class situation that it throws out main character into, preferring to set up the irony of his situation (his peerage and his discomfort with it) and then just use the rest for light satirical jabs at just about everyone. And the package delivers quite nicely.
Early sound is the era I find the most interesting, so I should note the increasingly complex sound design that Powell is embracing. Musicals are hard, especially with primitive sound technology, because sound is at the center of it all, needs to balance instrumentation with vocals, and tends towards a fair amount of editing, especially if you include dance, which Powell does here. Not everything feels closely modern or refined, but there's a lot of complicated moves, including cuts within dialogue, keeping soundtracks from one shot over another, and letting the music take over the soundtrack completely that don't feel like revolutionary moves from the advances he had made on Hotel Splendide, but they do feel like next steps, making the mixes more complicated and delicately assembled. It's a technical step up that can't be ignored.
So, the movie is fun. It's disposable and amusing, a bit derivative of Lubitsch (Bert and Lenina's number near the beginning feels a whole lot like "Let's Be Common" from Love Parade), but that's not something to just discard. That sort of entertainment can still entertain nearly 100 years later, and I think it does.
