The Pettigrews at least have a good address, and a younger daughter Helen (Heather Angel) pursued by a middle-aged, reasonably affluent creep Mr Throstle (Ferdinand Gottschalk). The prologue introduces periwigged, monied American patriot Peter Standish (Howard, not even trying to modify his Anglo-Hungarian cut-glass accent), who has just crossed the Atlantic from the newly-independent United States, intent on meeting and probably marrying Kate (Valerie Taylor), daughter of well-born, financially struggling Lady Ann Pettigrew (Irene Browne). Snipping news footage and headlines together to provide a sense of the world speeding through history towards disaster has been done many, many times since – and the convention almost certainly begins here. It feels as if Balderston took the movie money and made as few changes as possible to the play, though a prologue which slightly confuses things is an addition and there’s one cinematic montage as an 18th Century woman has a vision of the hectic years to come. Mounted for Fox with then-prestigious Frank Lloyd (coming off the Oscar-winning Cavalcade) as director and hot import Leslie Howard (who’d done the play) to star, it’s coffined by respectability in a way that, say, Frankenstein isn’t. In 1933, he scripted this version of his biggest stage hit, a timeslip historical romance (based on the unfinished Henry James novel The Sense of the Past) which has entered the genre gene-pool to influence Jack Finney, Rod Serling, Richard Matheson and many others. He went to Hollywood off the back of Broadway success and was often assigned theatrical or classic adaptations like The Prisoner of Zenda, The Last of the Mohicans and Gaslight.
Balderston is remembered at all, it’s thanks to screenwriting credits on 1930s Universal horror pictures (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, Bride of Frankenstein) which were multi-authored and owe little of their personality to the writing.
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