Leslie Howard

Heather Angel

Valerie Taylor

Irene Browne

Beryl Mercer

Colin Keith-Johnston

Alan Mowbray

Juliette Compton

Betty Lawford

Ferdinand Gottschalk

Samuel S. Hinds

Olaf Hytten

David Torrence

Lionel Belmore

Tom Ricketts

Hylda Tyson

Jesse L. Lasky

Frank Lloyd

Harold D. Schuster

Joseph E. Aiken

Charles E. McCarthy

Sonya Levien

Henry James

Jack Epstein

William S. Darling

John L. Balderston

Phil M. Friedman

Robert Mayo

Louis De Francesco

Earl Rettig

J.S. Zamecnik

Peter Brunelli

Harvey Clermont

Dave Regan

Ernest Palmer

William Lambert

Fantasy

Romance

Berkeley Square

Fox Film Corporation

United States of America

CinemaSerf

I found Oscar-nominated Leslie Howard just a little too earnest in this tale of an American scientist "Peter Standish" who inherits a London house from a distance cousin. Upon arrival, he starts to feel a curious bond with the place and as he discovers more about the house, his ancestry and a diary detailing much of the 1780s London society in which it's writer lived, he becomes - somewhat inexplicably - convinced that he is going to travel back through time. Low and behold on the exact date and time expected, he walks into an 18th century home where he meets his soon to be fiancée "Kate" (Valerie Taylor) and her beautiful younger sister "Helen" (Heather Angel). He is an instant hit in society circles but struggles to contain his knowledge of the future and after a particularly uncomfortable conversation with the Duchess of Devonshire (Juliette Compton) finds himself in immediate need to get back to his own timeline. He confides his predicament to his new love "Helen" and his dilemmas begin to mount up... It's an intriguing concept, and there is plenty of subliminal social comment too. "Standish" is abhorred by the depravity, poverty and cruelty he sees when first in London - but it has also got quite a bit of a rather ungainly American superiority complex about it, too - the "Land of the Free" stuff as though 1780s Britain was some sort of demagogue's paradise. Howard was in the original 1928 stage play, so knows the part backwards and there are some nice cameos from Alan Mowbray and Beryl Mercer to help nudge it along but it runs too much to gloopy melodrama, and though not a bad film, I just think it couldn't quite decide what it wanted to be, or for whom, and I found it's romanticised moralising a bit annoying. Stylish though, looks good.

English