MartinHafer "Berkeley Square" is a frustrating old film to watch. It has a really neat story idea about time travel--something very exciting for 1933. But it also has incredibly stilted language and the characters are too mannered to be interesting.When the film begins, you see Peter Standish (Leslie Howard) in both a 19th century setting and then in the present time. How is this possible? Well, it seems that he's inherited a magical old mansion--one that allows him to travel to 1784! Here he is a newly arrived Yankee arriving within polite British society. However, Peter's language is a bit odd and he seems to know too much--mostly because he knows what folks will do because he's read up on the history of the family. He knows who he will marry and how his life SHOULD go--but will this now happen since his intended fiancée is afraid of him?! As I mentioned above, the story idea involving time travel is pretty amazing for the 1930s. Plus, even now it is an interesting plot element. But I just wished Peter and the rest were less rigid and dull- -this plot should NEVER be dull. And, although it didn't bother me, my wife felt frustrated that so much of the film was never explained--such as how the woman could magically see the future by staring into Peter's eyes!! Worth seeing but it just missed the mark in too many ways to be anything other than an unusual curio.

Neil Doyle Leslie Howard proves once again that he was the matinée idol women adored long before he was unwillingly cast as Ashley Wilkes in "Gone with the Wind," a role he hated to play.He gives a very forceful performance here as a young man who is fascinated by his ancestry and somehow transports himself to an earlier era, with unhappy consequences he couldn't have expected when events turn against him.Heather Angel makes a good impression (she and Howard both starred in the Broadway stage version), but the tale itself is much too talky for the screen and would have benefited from a wider use of outdoor scenes to take away some of the stage-bound feeling. An unusual feature is the almost constant flow of background music in an era when most soundtracks were only punctuated by dialog without musical effects. This affects the quality of the spoken words, of which there are far too many for my taste and, in this case, because it's based on a stage play taken from an unfinished Henry James novel called "A Sense of Time." It takes a willingness to suspend disbelief in order to enjoy the fantasy aspects of the story, but it's done in an interesting way and directed in stylish fashion by Frank Lloyd.Summing up: One of Howard's better film performances, he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. Remade by Fox in 1951 as a film for Tyrone Power and Ann Blyth called "I'll Never Forget You."

kidboots For me, Heather Angel's name conjures up the image of delicate, wistful loveliness as the girl beloved by Leslie Howard, when he travels back to Regency times in "Berkeley Square". She seemed to come along at the right time to be a successor to Janet Gaynor but Fox didn't bother much about her after a role in a forgotten Charlie Chan movie, "Charlie Chan's Greatest Case" (1933). She did have some interesting moments in "Springtime for Henry" and "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" but after that her career just ambled along until she found a place as Phyllis Clavering in the Bulldog Drummond series.Peter Standish (Leslie Howard) is a wealthy American traveler who, unbeknownst to him, is about to be "hooked" into matrimony by an impoverished Regency family, the Pettigrews, whose son has spent the family fortune on wine, women and cards. Just as he arrives a fearful storm breaks out and .......................Marjorie Frant (Betty Lawford, who looked a lot older than 23!) is very concerned about her fiancé, Peter Standish - he keeps to his room and is obsessed by his ancestor Peter Standish. He has inherited the house in Berkeley Square that the original Peter Standish owned and spends his time pouring over a diary that tells him all the little details about the family and London life in the 1780s - especially Helen, who seems to have a "secret sorrow" and never marries. Walking back to his house during a storm and arriving at exactly 5.30 he is suddenly whisked back in time to 1785 and the intrigue that is going on at the Pettigrews!! He is so determined to do the right thing, to let events take their course without changing the course of history but he bumbles from the start. Almost proposing to Kate on their first meeting (he knows from the diary that Peter marries Kate) to revealing Helen's birthday gift, a beautiful shawl before the box is opened!!!Peter feels like a stranger in a strange land but also senses a kindred spirit in Helen who seems to understand he is not in his own time. I thought it was a touching, romantic fantasy with many scenes that bought tears to my eyes. When Helen looks into Peter's eyes and sees the future of the world, she is instantly repelled and cannot be coaxed by him to return to the future with him. She convinces him to go back and wait until they can both be reunited in the hereafter. Her speech is very eloquent. The original play by John L. Balderstone, who also wrote the screen play, was much more grittier - Standish was very disillusioned with the past, he was appalled by the squalor and poverty, by the horror of public hangings. In the movie John astounds everyone by insisting on a daily bath!!! So Helen's "seeing the future through John's eyes", which couldn't have worked on the stage, was a way to give the movie an added dimension.Alan Mowbray had a small role as Peter's friend and Beryl Mercer played what she played best, sweet little cockneys.I just loved this movie but can only give it 9 out of 10 because the soundtrack was very scratchy and the picture quality was very grainy. The play "Berkeley Square" opened on Broadway in 1929 and ran for a respectable 229 performances. The plot was suggested by a Henry James short story "The Sense of the Past".Highly, Highly Recommended.

F Gwynplaine MacIntyre In adapting his own stage play 'Berkeley Square' for the screen, playwright John L Balderston made numerous changes. One change is significant in hindsight: during Act One of the stage play, the dialogue makes several references to a war hero named Bill Clinton! (A hero on the side fighting AGAINST the United States.) In the film, this British officer is merely identified as Major Clinton, and there are no mentions of his heroics.Leslie Howard, everyone's definitive Englishman, was actually English only by a fluke: his parents were Hungarian Jews who moved to London shortly before his birth. In the film version of 'Berkeley Square', Howard portrays two Americans -- one from the 18th century, one from the present -- but his accent and demeanour in both roles are quintessentially English. Howard had previously starred on Broadway in this story, but in the stage play he portrayed only the modern-day Peter Standish who journeys into the past; his namesake ancestor (swapping places with him in the present) remained offstage.Here we have the fantasy about a modern American who contrives to switch places in time with his 18th-century ancestor: both men are named Peter Standish, and are physically identical. (This is unlikely: the medical, dental and nutritional standards in 1784 would have kept that century's Standish looking very different from his descendant.) Apart from failing to convince me that he's American, Howard gives an excellent performance in both roles. Soon enough, Peter Standish acquires a touch of Peter Ibbetson as he falls in love with a woman who will die in 1787, more than a century before his own birth.The ever-reliable Samuel S. Hinds (wearing a bizarre moustache here) plays straight man to Howard in one fascinating scene, in which Standish explains the difference between linear time and non-linear time: in the latter, all the events in the universe are occurring simultaneously.Also quite excellent is Betty Lawford in an unsympathetic role. She wears some very chic gloves but also sports a bizarre fur collar that seems to be intended for a female impersonator. A transvestite linebacker could hide his shoulders inside there!As the doomed young lady of 18th-century England, Heather Angel has one memorable scene opposite the 18th-century Standish's body possessed by his modern descendant. Staring into Standish's eyes, she glimpses an amazing stock-footage montage of the chaos and mayhem of modern times. Her reaction is memorable.A story like this will have intentional anachronisms, but I looked for unintentional errors. Here's one: a string ensemble in 1784 perform Gossec's 'Gavotte' two years before he wrote it. Have another: in the opening scene, set in September 1784, Lionel Belmore reports that a French aeronaut has just flown from Dover to Calais (Belmore mispronounces this name) in a balloon. Actually, that didn't happen until January 1785: the flight was in the opposite direction, and there were two men (one of them Anglo-American) in the balloon. In a later scene, some English gentlemen give the word 'bathed' the wrong pronunciation (yes, I'm quite certain). The art direction is generally excellent, except for a dodgy thunderstorm. And it's weird to encounter the term 'crux ansata' applied to what modern viewers know better as the Egyptian ankh.This film gets very much right a detail that many other period stories get wrong: 'Berkeley Square' acknowledges that the past is a dirtier, not cleaner, place than the present.The single worst thing about 'Berkeley Square' is the overscored soundtrack: practically every scene assaults the ears with loud background music, when so much of this gentle fantasy would have worked better with no music at all. I was delighted that the character actress Beryl Mercer is much less annoying than usual here, probably because (for once) she's been given no maudlin material. My rating for this gentle, stately fantasy is 7 out of 10. For a much more romantic treatment of this premise with a different set of time-travel paradoxes, I recommend a better movie: 'Somewhere in Time'.