The Ben Travers farces staring Walls and Lynn were hugely popular in the twenties and thirties. Some of those filmed plays were funny, really funny but as this shows, by 1937 they'd run out of steam.
Writer Travers and character actor Walls kept going well into the forties but after this, "silly ass" Ralph Lynn wisely called it a day. It's sad and annoying to see this team creating such tiresome and uninspired material after their moment in the sun just a few years earlier but so many comedy teams don't seem to know when to quit.
This film has an interesting story and being produced by Max Schach, who famously threw more money than most at his productions, it looks very impressive. (Indeed Max Schach was so extravagant with his budgets that he went bankrupt just after wasting his money on this.) There's a clever touch when we see the schoolboy version of them speaking with the voices of our two stars (unless you're a Walls + Lynn fan you'll probably just the sound has gone wrong!) but the direction is very pedestrian. Tom Walls insisted on directing his pictures himself but this is as static and turgid as his very first efforts at the start of the decade. That's the problem his style - not just in direction, didn't move with the times.
The other problem is that although some of Tom Wall's comedy characters were very funny, his 'normal persona' which he uses for one of the leads in this simply doesn't come across as that likeable. This one is for Aldwych Farce completists only - of perhaps they'd be the ones who shouldn't watch this as like me it's a bit of a sad postscript to end a reasonably decent career.
