Actually Friday the thirteenth was a lucky date for Jessie Matthews – that was the night in February 1925 in Toronto that she became a leading lady of the stage at 17 years old after understudying Gertrude Lawrence. I hadn't seen this little film gem since the '90's - UK Channel 4 used to screen a good quality copy - but remembered it word for word. Plenty of British films from the early '30's are either thoughtful or entertaining, this managed to be both although technologically (and logically) as primitive as usual.
London midnight bus crashes into a building to avoid a falling crane and two of its passengers are killed. A rather flimsy Big Ben rewinds to the morning and we begin to see retrospectively unfolding the various and varied lives of the people involved in the crash and what led to them being on the bus. It was a talkie remake of a 1929 film The Bridge At San Luis Rey regarding a collapsing bridge and the people who were either affected or killed. So, there's a good tight script flashing between all the characters, and what a set of characters! Jessie Matthews as a wide-eyed "non stop" hoofer and her then brand new husband Sonnie Hale as the cynical bus conductor, Ralph Richardson played her lover as an energetic school teacher (and they apparently got on very well on set too), babe in the park Robertson Hare, Edmund Gwenn, Max Miller with some of his fastest ever patter, Hartley Power, the film's co-scriptwriter Emlyn Williams as a sinister blackmailer, and many other British regulars were in attendance. You might have some fun trying to work out who might end up dead, but ultimately it all follows fairly conventional moral lines – one end just, the other bittersweet. If remade nowadays of course this film's probable ending would be that a character playing a mass-murdering pervert would be the only one to survive – and would not be meant as irony but as a happy ending.
Jessie had such a busy year in 1933 she collapsed with nervous exhaustion which made the commencement of the shooting of her classic Evergreen difficult – FTT turned out to be a different type of classic. It's a simple and perfectly packed potpourri of tales, to be sure it displays the mores, prejudices and snobbery of the time but the basic tales can all be still applied to today and are engrossing to watch from start to finish.
London midnight bus crashes into a building to avoid a falling crane and two of its passengers are killed. A rather flimsy Big Ben rewinds to the morning and we begin to see retrospectively unfolding the various and varied lives of the people involved in the crash and what led to them being on the bus. It was a talkie remake of a 1929 film The Bridge At San Luis Rey regarding a collapsing bridge and the people who were either affected or killed. So, there's a good tight script flashing between all the characters, and what a set of characters! Jessie Matthews as a wide-eyed "non stop" hoofer and her then brand new husband Sonnie Hale as the cynical bus conductor, Ralph Richardson played her lover as an energetic school teacher (and they apparently got on very well on set too), babe in the park Robertson Hare, Edmund Gwenn, Max Miller with some of his fastest ever patter, Hartley Power, the film's co-scriptwriter Emlyn Williams as a sinister blackmailer, and many other British regulars were in attendance. You might have some fun trying to work out who might end up dead, but ultimately it all follows fairly conventional moral lines – one end just, the other bittersweet. If remade nowadays of course this film's probable ending would be that a character playing a mass-murdering pervert would be the only one to survive – and would not be meant as irony but as a happy ending.
Jessie had such a busy year in 1933 she collapsed with nervous exhaustion which made the commencement of the shooting of her classic Evergreen difficult – FTT turned out to be a different type of classic. It's a simple and perfectly packed potpourri of tales, to be sure it displays the mores, prejudices and snobbery of the time but the basic tales can all be still applied to today and are engrossing to watch from start to finish.