Racing was Edgar Wallace's first love and as an owner, tipster, gambler writer and journalist he mixed with everyone connected with the sport from the highest to the lowest. THE CALENDAR, referring to the Racing Calendar, was one of his most successful plays which even recently has been described as the best play about racing ever written.
Geoffrey Kerr's screenplay loses some of the tension but accentuates the more amusing side of the story to congenial effect. One or two references to coupons and rationing to reflect the austere world of 1948 can't really disguise the play's origins in the 1920's though. The casting is excellent with the glamorous Greta Gynt as the capricious Lady Wenda gaining a large share of the contemporary publicity arrayed in a number of exotic hats. Hard to understand why Sonia Holm did not become a star as she always impressed as intelligent and very attractive, yet her career ended abruptly a few tears later and she died aged only 52 in 1974. Leslie Dwyer makes the most of Hillcott, the rascally butler and the type of amiable, working-class minor crook that was another speciality of Wallace's. John McCallum is fine in the lead and the role of the blustering idiotic Willie could have been designed for Raymond Lovell. Altogether THE CALENDAR is a minor but most entertaining example of the flowering of British cinema in the Forties.
