Return to Yesterday

The underrated Clive Brook stars as a movie star discontented with his life and yearning for the days of his youth when he had a passion for acting and life. On a whim he disembarks a train and comes upon a struggling group of actors in a seaside town. He gets hired and helps them put on a show. He also falls in love with the leading lady (Anna Lee).

Utterly charming film that clocks in at 70 minutes. Brook is terrific as he gets carried away with his newfound theatrical adventure and love, knowing somehow that reality will catch up with him. He cannot return to yesterday.

Co-stars include May Witty as the old actress, O.B. Clarence as her husband, Elliott Mason as Priskin the acerbic landlady, David Tree as the playwright, Milton Rosmer as the crooked manager, Olga Lindo as his wife, Hartley Power as the American agent, and Mollie Rankin as Christine.

Clive Brook had been in films since 1920 and would cap his film career in 1944 with ON APPROVAL. He would return one last time for a small role in THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER in 1963. For a while in the early talkie period, Brook rivaled Ronald Colman as the epitome of the urbane British sophisticate.

Based on a play by Robert Morley, this story was filmed several times under its original title GOODNESS, HOW SAD.

Thanks to a UK film channel I caught up with this good film. It shows many things. About how we age and try to accept it, about the UK just before WW2 and that wonderful experience of end of the pier theatre long since lost. Clive Brook is good as an ageing man falling in love with Anna Lee playing a very youthful actor in the theatre company. Most of the cast will be possibly unknown to the young of this century, but were valued in the first half of the 20th century, and that is a loss in itself, but as the title says you cannot return to yesterday. May Whitty is in the film who was so good in ' The Lady Vanishes ' directed by Alfred Hitchcock and she is excellent here giving Clive Brook some very wise advice about the young, and how ideally the young should be with each other. Well worth seeing for its clarity and its wisdom, and the underrated Robert Stevenson directed. Known for working with Disney, he made before that experience a few gems of cinema, and this is one of them.

The personality of Robert Morley is already amply in evidence in this breezy early Michael Balcon production adapted from his 1937 play 'My Goodness, How Sad', drawing upon a season he spent with Sir Frank Benson's company.

Already nostalgic when he wrote it, and doubly so when released in January 1940 evoking pre-war Britain; after over eighty years it now seems even more from another era.

The basic premise of this film is that Clive Brooks is a big Hollywood film star who has returned home for a brief spell .He wants to escape from the pressures of this(don't they all) and ends up in a seaside town where he began his career and decides to help out an end of pier theatre.Even if Brooks had been a star he was now past his sell by date,being 53 when he made this film.So rather an unlikely star.Brooks is his usual wooden self,and the fact that he appeared in such an insignificant film means that he must have accepted that his film career was wending to a close.It passes the team reasonably and its shortness means that it does not outstay its welcome.

Included as the first film in Volume 11 of the Ealing Studios Rarities Collection I came to this film with low expectations, which were very rapidly surpassed. From the very first scene, in which a young playwright whose first play is to be staged at a seaside theatre is taken down several pegs by the man posting the bill advertising it, the script is as beautifully polished as the accents of the leading characters, and the supporting cast is a delight. There's an enormous sense of fun about the film, though Clive Brook as the jaded British Hollywood star trying to rediscover the secret of his youthful happiness occasionally dampens the mood. Now eighty years old there is also oodles of period charm in various railway and seaside scenes.

If anything lets the film down it's the romantic element of the plot, which is not terribly believable, though I suppose one could make the same criticism of several Shakespeare plays, and whether it's plausible or not without it there would have been no way to set up some of the most entertaining scenes.