Return to Yesterday

The basic premise of this film is that Clive Brooks is a big Hollywood film star who has returned home for a brief spell .He wants to escape from the pressures of this(don't they all) and ends up in a seaside town where he began his career and decides to help out an end of pier theatre.Even if Brooks had been a star he was now past his sell by date,being 53 when he made this film.So rather an unlikely star.Brooks is his usual wooden self,and the fact that he appeared in such an insignificant film means that he must have accepted that his film career was wending to a close.It passes the team reasonably and its shortness means that it does not outstay its welcome.

The personality of Robert Morley is already amply in evidence in this breezy early Michael Balcon production adapted from his 1937 play 'My Goodness, How Sad', drawing upon a season he spent with Sir Frank Benson's company. Already nostalgic when he wrote it, and doubly so when released in January 1940 evoking pre-war Britain; after over eighty years it now seems even more from another era.

Thanks to a UK film channel I caught up with this good film. It shows many things. About how we age and try to accept it, about the UK just before WW2 and that wonderful experience of end of the pier theatre long since lost. Clive Brook is good as an ageing man falling in love with Anna Lee playing a very youthful actor in the theatre company. Most of the cast will be possibly unknown to the young of this century, but were valued in the first half of the 20th century, and that is a loss in itself, but as the title says you cannot return to yesterday. May Whitty is in the film who was so good in ' The Lady Vanishes ' directed by Alfred Hitchcock and she is excellent here giving Clive Brook some very wise advice about the young, and how ideally the young should be with each other. Well worth seeing for its clarity and its wisdom, and the underrated Robert Stevenson directed. Known for working with Disney, he made before that experience a few gems of cinema, and this is one of them.