Time and Tide, 17 MAY 1941
It is a pleasure to be able to report, for once, that a novel has been filmed and remained recognizable. This version sticks very closely to the original Wells, even to the point of making a stage play rather than a film out of it. But that is forgivable in what is naturally a good story with a strong period-interest.
It was an exceptionally good piece of casting to give the name-part to Michael Redgrave,1 who is not only an actor out of the common but looks the part. So does Miss Diana Wynyard as Helen Walsingham, the ambitious and cultured young woman to whom Kipps, when he has come into money and is attempting to ‘improve’ himself, is briefly and unhappily engaged. It was a bold gesture, but I think justified, to give the Folkestone episodes, with their picture of a society now as remote as that of the Fiji Islands, the same prominence as they had in the novel. Wells-fans will remember how Kipps, a young man working in a drapery, suddenly inherited twenty-six thousand pounds and endeavoured, until the effort became too great for him, to make himself into a gentleman according to the standards of the time. The comedy of the situation depended on class-differences which no longer effectively exist, and on intellectual fashions which are almost completely forgotten. When Kipps painfully crashed his way into ‘good’ society he was taken up not by the County, but by the intelligentsia of Folkestone, who were then (1908) still in the pre-Raphaelite stage. It was still the era of the Yellow Book, of the Burne-Jones maidens with their unhinged necks and russet-coloured hair, of Omar Khayyam in limp leather covers, and also of ‘the new inmoralism’ and ‘splendid sins’. Helen Walsingham, it will be remembered, eloped with a married novelist, after her brother, a disciple of Nietzsche, had embezzled Kipps’s money. As usual, the producers have mistrusted their audience’s intelligence and not guyed the Coote-Walsingham intelligentsia quite as amusingly as they might have done, but the other period touches are good and the clothes exceptionally good. Only one mistake did I detect. In one place there is a reference to bustles. That is wrong. An early memory of my own, in 1907 or 1908, is finding a bustle in a cupboard and asking various grown-ups what it was for. Even at that date it seemed an antique.
It is questionable how much of the special atmosphere of an early Wells novel can be got into so different a medium as the film. Curiously enough Mr Wells, the apostle of progress and the future, has been able more than almost any other writer to make the sleepy years at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one seem a good time to live in. There is a certain flavour in Kipps, Mr Polly and The Wheels of Chance which probably could not survive even the most skilful filming. But this is a valiant attempt, and almost certainly as good a screen version of Kipps as we shall get. It is a pleasure to see so many films appearing with an Edwardian setting. It is time we stopped laughing at that period and realized that it had its points, as we did with the mid-Victorian age some twenty years ago. I recommend this film both to those who have read the book, and to those who haven’t. Besides Mr Redgrave and Miss Wynyard, Mr Arthur Riscoe, Mr Edward Rigby, Mr Max Adrian and Miss Phyllis Calvert all give excellent performances.