User Reviews

Tom Walls directed and starred in a series of light social comedies written by Ben Travers. These were hugely successful in the 1920s (and for some years beyond that decade), and are collectively known as the Aldwych farces, in honour of the West End theatre that was Walls's and Travers's base camp.

The main action of 'A Night Like This' takes place in a London nightclub which is a front for gangsters. (I can't believe that any London nightclub would be a front for gangsters ... not with respectable businessmen like Ron and Reggie Kray making sure that all the nightclub owners stay honest!) Cora Mellish (Winifred Shotter) is a nightclub dancer who has run up a substantial gambling debt. To avoid having her legs broken (and losing her livelihood) she puts up a valuable necklace as security. Unfortunately, Cora doesn't own the necklace: it was loaned to her by her boyfriend Aubrey (Claude Hulbert), but he doesn't own it either; it actually belongs to his very fearsome aunt (Norma Varden), a battle-axe who would put several of Bertie Wooster's aunts to shame.

Into this confusion comes undercover detective Mike Mahoney, played by Walls. While solving the case, he falls in love with Cora. This sets up a triangle with Hulbert, but -- this being an Aldwych farce -- there's never any doubt as to who will get the girl.

A large factor in the success of the Aldwych farces was their predictability: audiences wanted stock characters and stock situations, and got what they expected. Here we have thick-ear gangsters, henpecked husbands, silly-ass toffs, and of course a pompous git (the amusing Robertson Hare) losing his trousers, thus paving the way for Brian Rix and the Whitehall farces. As a bonus, we get Al Bowlly as the leader of the nightclub orchestra, all of them playing in fine form. The only cast member I didn't like was Mary Brrough (the British film industry's equivalent to Hollywood's Maud Eburne) as a shrieking shrew. (Please fix the IMDb spell- check so I can spell 'Brrough' properly.)

The entire film is directed very much like a stage play, even to the extent of having the cast take a curtain call at the end! However, I actually enjoyed this, as it gave me some notion of what it must have been like to see one of these farces at the Aldwych Theatre in George V's day. I'll rate 'A Night Like This' 8 out of 10. Well done all round!

For a farce, this is actually quite entertaining - I'm not keen on broad humour, but this rarely goes over the top. Note that I say 'rarely' and certainly not 'never'!

The film opens with a vivid montage of London, with music winding out from a couple of down-at-heel players in a pub across street scenes, night life and even the river. Finally one of the characters we glimpse turns out to be our eventual protagonist -- a constable on 'point duty', guiding the traffic at a busy junction. But PC Mahoney has a sweetheart who is a lowly attendant at a nightclub, the Moonstone, and when she tips him off that there is an illegal gambling operation being operated above the club, he decides to take matters into his own hands and turn up to conduct an investigation in plain clothes in the hopes of getting promotion into the detective branch. Mahoney (who never loses his thick Irish brogue despite dressing up as a gentleman of means) is the most likeable and resourceful characterin the plot; Claude Hulbert plays silly-ass Aubrey, who is always eager to help but only ever seems to make things worse, and toothy Ralph Lynn plays Clifford Tope, who volunteers to pay off a blackmailer for the sake of a pretty stranger whose dancing appealed to him, but takes it into his head to try to confront the man instead, thus causing endless trouble.

The romantic interest, such as it is, lies between Tope and night-club star Cora, although since he is cowardly and not particularly intelligent (his only success lies in hiding behind a curtain and bopping Mahoney's assailants over the head) it's not clear that she feels anything for him beyond misplaced gratitude. Mahoney and his Molly, despite getting little screen time together, are much more endearing as a couple.

There's the obligatory scene where someone loses his trousers, which actually makes sense in the context of the plot; there's a sub-plot of a villain behind the villain, which leads to some amusing scenes. (Please can I blackmail her? Please?) Most of the funny parts involve the resourceful Mahoney talking rings round the other characters; a character being intelligent is always much more entertaining than characters being stupid. Likewise C.V.France, as the brains behind the whole gambling operation, gets the best lines out of the various villains, especially in the scene where he is attempting to interrogate three semi-conscious toughs as to exactly what happened to them.

The lanky Norma Varden and diminutive Robertson Hare make a study in comic contrast as Aubrey's redoubtable aunt and uncle with an eye for the ladies respectively; Mary Brough is Cora's gruff and indignant dresser, who has to put up with a succession of men in and out of the dressing-room and her mistress' flat. The on-screen dancing isn't particularly impressive by Hollywood chorus line standards -- apart from anything else the girls have very little room to play with! -- but Al Bowlly puts in a cameo appearance as the night-club's crooner.

The final scene ends with the villains being marched off en masse, followed by our victorious protagonists, which leads to a slightly surreal ending where the night-club audience and people in the street start applauding and the whole cast pauses and fans out down the front steps, heroes and villains alike, in what you eventually realise is the equivalent of the original play's curtain call. Otherwise the show's stage origins are not obviously intrusive and -- for a farce that features people getting bopped over the head, trapped in doors, and making eyes at pretty maids -- it's often genuinely amusing. The BFI bills this film as one of the best of the Ben Travers screen adaptations, and I can believe it.