9/10
Wonderfully wicked and subversive...
29 December 2022
... as it lampoons both the working and upper classes and how they see themselves and one another in this British romantic comedy from director Alexander Korda.

The film opens with the presses being held at a major London newspaper for details of an upper class wedding. At a working class flat in London a man arrives home to find his grown daughter reading about the wedding and he is told his dinner is not ready because his wife is at the wedding. He goes into a "workers of the world unite" tirade against the upper classes, but then he hears some tidbit about the wedding and it appears he is just as easily taken up by the story as his daughter and next door neighbor.

That newspaper article I mentioned gets the attention of the dowager Marchioness of Buckminster, who is annoyed that her grandson the Marquis (Roland Young, ), a confirmed bachelor, is once again a best man and not a groom. She demands that he get married or risk being financially cut off. She gives him a list of eligible women of proper breeding from which to choose. At the top of the list are the Roxbury twins (Wendy Barrie and Joan Gardner), but they have their hearts set on "Bimbo" (John Loder) and "Toodles" (Maurice Evans). Young facilitates the marriage of those four, and then sets out to see all of the other women on the list are married to others, too. Young's antics are observed under the scornful eye of his grandmother's secretary (Merle Oberon).

Everybody is just wonderful in this film including George Grossmith as the Earl of Stokeshire and the father of the twins who does a wonderful unintentional impression of the Monopoly Man, and Lady Tree as his sweetly addled-pate wife and mother of the twins. She has a hilarious scene where she is trying to explain the facts of life to the twins before the wedding using the example of prepackaged food. You'd think she'd figure they already know that, as they have an abundance of cats and dogs who have recently given birth which would at least give them the general idea.
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