Bitter Sweet

Anna Neagle - Sarah Linden
Fernand Gravey - Carl Linde
Esme Percy - Hugh Devon
Clifford Heatherley - Mr. Schlick
Ivy St. Helier - Manon La Crevette
Miles Mander - Captain Auguste Lutte
Pat Paterson - Dolly
Hugh Williams - Vincent

Noel Coward's musical weepy was first produced at Her Majesty's Theatre London in 1929, and later in the same year in New York (Ziegfield Theatre) with Evelyn Laye.

Set in Vienna, with a plot involving a poor musician, a lady, who through poverty, becomes a dance hall hostess, an amorous count and a fatal duel, it can been seen as Coward's tribute to the world of operetta, its flashback structure providing an invocation to a past Viennese world. It is, however, an incomplete version of the operetta, with over half the score missing, with much filleting of the script and songs (check out the recently recorded 2x CD set on TER records (CD TER -2 -1160) to see just what has been omitted, numbers such as: That Wonderful Melody/The Call of Life/If You Could Only Come with Me/What is Love?/The Last Dance/Life in the Morning/Ladies of the Town/Bonne Nuit Merci/Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay/Kiss Me/Alas, the Time is Past/We All Wear a Green Carnation/Zigeuner).

Unimaginatively directed by Herbert Wilcox, the film only really comes to life in the café scenes, where I think one can attribute any visual flair (such as the tracking shot on the bottle on the waiter's tray at the lead in to Tokay) to the cameraman, Freddie Young (the same Freddie Young who went on to photograph Lawrence of Arabia thirty years later), especially as Wilcox, coming from the a business/distribution background, was renowned within the industry for an almost complete lack of knowledge of the technicalities of film making (such as where to place the camera). It is said that many of his films were actually ‘directed’' on the floor by his regular cameraman, Max Greene (Mutz Greenbaum). After a well-filmed opening scene set in 1930s (the ‘modern’ tailpieces feature the contemporary dance music of Lew Stone and his band) there follows a dully filmed static dialogue scene in long takes between Sarah and Carl.

The leading actresses are excellent in this film: both Anna Neagle as Sarah, Marchioness of Shane (the Peggy Wood role sings Í'll See You Again and the duet Dear Little Cafe) and Ivy St. Helier (as Manon, La Crevette) who gives a heart rending performance of Noel Coward's classic If Love were All are superb. The men are much weaker (and Fernand Graavey as Carl, the music teacher, gives a particularly feeble performance). Hugh Williams makes an impression, however, in an incisive cameo role in the prologue and epilogue scenes. The main interest of this film is that it was made only four years after first production, and so preserves a contemporary style of performance, which is of great historical value. But if only Herbert Wilcox had taken the entire West End cast into the film studio (although he would inevitably have replaced Peggy Wood with his lifelong amour and later wife, Anna Neagle), and filmed a musically complete version, perhaps with some judicious trimming of some of the dialogue scenes, this film would have been priceless.

It is Ivy St. Helier who provides us with an indication of what might have been. Still, it is a fascinating effort. This film of Bitter Sweet was very popular with audiences in 1933, and is in many ways preferable to the MGM Hollywood version, which Noel Coward, incidentally hated. The version viewed was distributed by Raymond Roehaeur, and ran for about 80 minutes, even shorter than the running time in many reference guides of 93 minutes.
Review© Roger Mellor.