January

The year begins interestingly with His Majesty & Co., a modest piece directed by Anthony Kimmins for Fox Films, but ‘a charming musical trifle, showing a delightful and typical English sense of humour’. It was in sharp contrast to Kimmins’s other 1935 project for Fox, Once in a New Moon, a sort of science fiction story set in middle England, with faint hints of things to come in R. C. Sherriff’s fascinating 1939 novel The Hopkins Manuscript (why did a British studio never turn it into a movie?). Sally Sutherland’s screenplay for His Majesty & Co. told the story of John (John Garrick), holidaying in the Ruritanian principality of Poldavia and falling for the oddly named Princess Sandra (Barbara Waring). Returning to Britain, he meets not only the princess but her parents (Morton Selten and Mary Grey). As the King is a wine expert and the Queen a decent cook, they get together to open a restaurant, where John can also sing at table. The by-now-ubiquitous Wally Patch as Bert Hicks represents the lower orders. The music is by Viennese Wilhelm Grosz, another émigré escaping from the Nazis, and probably best known as the composer of ‘Red Sails In The Sunset’. Alfredo Campoli and His Tzigane Orchestra and speciality act Betty le Brocke were on hand to take the audience’s mind off this unlikely tale.