Tayyab Torres
Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.
Portia Hilton
Blistering performances.
Curt
Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.
writers_reign
It would be easy to take the first episode here in which Edmund Gwen walks out on a shrewish wife after years of nagging as a steal from Noel Coward's one-acter Fumed Oak but it would also be wrong. Coward wrote - and starred in - the nine (originally ten but one was dropped after one performance) that together comprised Tonight At 8.30 in 1936, close to a decade after Priestly wrote The Good Companions as a novel and some three years after the first film version was released. If we allow for the limitations that obtained in 1933 this is a charming and simplistic valentine to the Lost Empires that Priestly would write about decades later. Today the supporting players draw the eye, none more so than Mary Gwynne, now totally forgotten, whilst Jesse Matthews around whom the film is clearly built, appears mannered and OTT. It remains a charming curio.
kidboots
This is just the most splendid movie. It is about a group of strangers coming together to help out a stranded troupe of players, calling themselves "The Dinky Doos". All of the cast were wonderful but Jessie Matthews was a revelation as Susie Dean and seemed to grow in confidence as the movie progressed. Amazingly, she had not been keen to star in the film. She had appeared in a couple of films with unsympathetic directors and had lost confidence about the way she photographed and her ability in front of a camera. But Victor Saville was a different type of director - more sensitive and helpful and he personally conducted Jessie Matthews screen test for the role. In addition, she was also surrounded by old friends - Edmund Gwen, who had known her from her "Andre Charlot's Revue' days and Richard Dolman, who had starred with Jessie at the Pavilion. She, in turn, was able to help John Gielgud - it was only his second talkie.Three strangers find themselves in Rawnsley - following their dreams. Jess Oakroyd (Edmund Gwen) has fled a nagging, shrewish wife (Jack Hawkins has a small part as a lazy lodger). Miss Trant (Mary Glynne) has looked after her parents all her life - even forfeiting her one chance of romance. Now she is on her own and wants a bit of freedom. Indigo Jolivant (John Gielgud) is a young teacher who takes the first chance to break free of the constricting school life. After some adventures, the three of them find themselves in a cafe with the Dinky Doos - a traveling troupe who are stranded after their manager takes off with all their money.Immediately Miss Trant takes charge and with her inheritance money, stakes them for 10 weeks to make good ....or bust!! She becomes their manager, Indigo writes their songs and Jess becomes the handy man. In the first of their many tiffs, Susie takes offence when Indigo turns up his nose at her songs and says he could write better ones. When she stomps off he gives her song "Lucky for Me" to Jerry (Richard Dolman) who thinks it's the best song he has ever heard.Things are not going great for the Good Companions (as they have re-christened themselves). Miss Trant has booked halls around the seaside areas - thinking of the rainy English weather, but that year there is a heatwave and instead of packed halls they are playing to empty ones because everyone is down at the beach. Just as they are down to their last shilling and are ready to give up, the rain is heard pattering on the roof. That turns into applause as Susie goes into her dazzling dance to "Three Wishes". It is a wonderful bit of cinema.After that the world is their oyster and Susie dreams of conquering the West End. Indigo works behind the scenes to give her her chance, by trying to sell his songs to a West End producer - Susie, of course, doesn't realise it until the end. She is also doing a bit of string pulling, trying to get Miss Trant and her long lost sweetheart together, even if she has to fake a heart attack to do it!!! I cannot watch the end without crying my eyes out, as the Dinky Doos benefit performance is marred by hecklers and a fire. Susie is inconsolable, thinking she has lost her chance of success (the producer, Finlay Currie) is in the audience. But he is not put off and to the chant of "We Want Susie", she comes back on stage, to sing with a tear stained faced "Let Me Give My Happiness to You". As the song plays on, the film comes to a close - Susie becomes a West End star, dancing in a beautiful glittery vagabond inspired costume, Indigo leading the orchestra, Miss Trant and her sweetheart renew their love and Jess sets sail for Canada to visit his beloved daughter.I think everyone in the world should see this film. Set in a time when strangers helped strangers, everyone pitched in to do their best and the Dinky Doos motto was "Just Do It"!!!Highly, Highly Recommended.
Spondonman
I always preferred this film to the book – although Priestley was an accessible and clever writer his sub-Dickens style and standard left wing leanings (ie support of state capitalism and not socialism) put me off a little. And of course on a much more important if shallower level to me the 25 year old Jessie Matthews was the main thing in here!Four separate people in provincial Britain are on the tramp to somewhere after leaving their homes, jobs etc to search for life and adventure. They all converge at Rawsley in the Midlands on a jolly pierrot troupe on its last legs called the Dinky Doos, join them and eventually turn their fortunes around as The Good Companions … after it starts raining. There's an endless great British cast, most notably simple Jess Oakroyd from Bruddersford (surely Bradford/Huddersfield?) who was played by avuncular Edmund Gwenn with an OTT Yorkshire accent and talented Inigo Jollifant by angular John Geilgud with an OTT Cambridge accent. The rising star of the troupe Susie Dean was played by lovely Jessie Matthews who had two spellbinding songs, Three Wishes sung with Geilgud and a magically tear-struck Let Me Give My Happiness To You – the money shots are her close ups during this! There was a fine orchestral accompaniment throughout and with only occasionally hokey lapses the production was superb. The solitary message is plain: working together to overcome adversity for a common purpose - even though the ending is altered from the book the various outcomes are the same.Altogether a memorable film for the non-serious looking for innocuous entertainment from another world, the serious should stick to the book as Priestley's works are Art. Absolutely!
bensonj
Jessie Matthews made a number of very charming British musicals during the thirties. (One of the better ones, FIRST A GIRL, an early version of VICTOR/VICTORIA, has just been released on video.) But THE GOOD COMPANIONS is not a musical, although it has musical sequences, nor is it really a Matthews vehicle, though she's prominently featured and outstanding.It's a marvellous adaptation of J. B. Priestly's story of three individuals who are prodded by events into taking to the open road and who subsequently meet up with each other and a small troupe of entertainers called the Dinky Doos. The introductory sequence for each of the characters is delightful and meticulously detailed. Perhaps the best is Edmund Gwenn's; after a lifetime with the company he is sacked and decides to leave his shrewish wife. Gwenn has a wonderful great thick Midlands accent here; when checking a car that won't start, he finds the problem to be "mooky ploogs" (mucky spark plugs). This short sequence is so detailed, with characters so fully drawn (including a young Jack Hawkins) it could have made up a whole film. John Gielgud (in his first film) is a master at a threadbare school run by a tight-lipped puritanical battle-ax, who catches him mimicking her husband. Mary Glynne has spent her life nursing her invalid father; when he dies she decides to spend her small inheritance on the road before accepting a life of drudgery. Each of the three have amusing adventures on the road (some delightful plot construction here) before all winding up in the same tea room with the stranded Dinky Doos. They all decide, over a shared evening meal, to join together and form a new group called "The Good Companions." As they travel around England, Jessie Matthews (one of the Doos) gets larger and larger billing. (At first, one thinks she'll be a minor player in this early film, since she's not "featured" in the early group scenes, but it seems to have been a creative decision to have the most important character gradually insinuate herself into the film.) Finally, Gielgud gets music publisher-impresario Finlay Currie ("Me, in person, not a moving picture") to see the show, and, after further complications, Matthews and Gielgud are headed for the big time.In so many of her films, Matthews plays an ingenue waiting to be discovered, and never for a moment does one feel that this is a writer's convention as is so often the case (think Joan Crawford's "dancing" being discovered in DANCING LADY). Jessie Matthews' ability and magnetism are so evident there's just no question that when the right person finally sees her perform her star quality will be instantly recognized. This was never more true than in THE GOOD COMPANIONS, where Matthews' vitality, youth, sex appeal and talent absolutely light up the film! Like every aspect of this film, the romance between Gielgud and Matthews is remarkable to behold.She's so strong willed, so incandescent, Gielgud seems almost afraid to burn his fingers, yet dares to hold his own. As with only the finest fairy tale fantasies, this is absolutely grounded in the real world, filled with sharp, rich characterizations and the details of its time and place. The episodic plot is sentimental yet honest, romantic yet realistic. The performances, from major to minor players, are uniformly excellent. But it's Priestly's story and Victor Saville's superb direction that make this a special experience. The film has a miraculous quality about it, a mysterious perfection that's like no other film I can think of. Of the thousands of films I've seen in the last fifty years this one of my very favorites. I've seen it twice theatrically and am eagerly looking forward to the video release so I can watch it again and again.
