The second production of Powell and Jerry Jackson’s Westminster Films company, His Lordship reunited Powell writer Philip MacDonald and star Jerry Verno. It stands as a fascinating oddity – a musical satire of the British class system that, although received poorly at the time, now looks highly enjoyable, with a very British sense of humour and endearingly memorable songs. Long believed lost, a print was eventually found following the BFI’s 1992 ‘Missing Believed Lost’ campaign.
The film upends the usual Brit ish snobberies by having Verno play a plumber who discovers to his horror that he is, in fact, a hereditary Lord – something he keeps a secret from his fiancée Leninia (Polly Ward) because, as her name might indicate, she is a communist who disapproves of such privilege.
Ralph Smart’s witty script is full of colloquial 1930s dialogue, and Pow ell makes smart use of location footage, with the result that His Lordship today offers unlikely windows into its time – even sending up the British susceptibility to Hollywood PR. It also introduced audiences to the wonderful Muriel George, best remembered for her part in Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? ten years later; here she plays Bert’s mother, making her film debut aged 50.
However, the contemporary response was damning. The film was reportedly barracked from the screen when it opened at London’s Dominion in September 1932, and the trade press seized on it as an example of the apparent damage the quota system was doing to the prestige of British cinema. “Kinematograph Weekly” complained that: “This effort, which starts off as a musical comedy, drifts into burlesque, then finishes up in a rich satirical vein, is neither flesh, fowl, or good red herring.” Tellingly, this is a charge similar to many of those levelled by some contemporary reviewers at Powell and Pressburger’s 1940s masterworks. Even at this early stage of his career, Powell was already confounding the narrow strictures imposed by many in the British film industry.

James Bell