COMEDY IN GANGLAND

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22194, 10 September 1937, Page 18

COMEDY IN GANGLAND

jeeves, so sad-eyed, so gentle, so utterly proper, thought gangland to be “a bit of all right." They could swindle him, bamboozle him. and buffet him about, but he insisted on proper manners. and so the underworld was in a dither when P. G. Wodehouse’s famed “gentleman’s gentleman” went berserk for a delightful period of buffoonery in the second saga of misadventures, “Step Lively, Jeeves!” which is coming to the State. The incomparable Arthur Treacher is featured in the title role.

Patricia Ellis and Robert Kent are Jeeves’s only friends in the strange America he is seeing for the first time as the unwitting dupe of Alan Dinehart and George Givot, a couple of swindlers trying hard to make a dishonest living. . .. ... . Unlimited fun and excitement attach to the earnest social-climbing efforts of Helen Flint, wife of a retired gangster. when she obtains for her society splash the heir to the millions of Sir Francis Drake, the suddenly prominent “Earl of Bedford,” which is the bogus title the two confidence men have bestowed upon their unsuspecting friend. _ , „ . The screen play, by Frank Fenton and Lynn Root, adapted from an original story by Frances Hyland, gets more and more hilariously involved as

World-famous Character in “Step Lively, Jeeves’’

the swindlers, realising they are trying to mulct a former public enemy and his followers, attempt to scramble out of their deal, failing because they had sold their victim too thoroughly. When Jeeves's true identity is discovered fireworks of an unsafe and in»ane Fourth-of-July nature break loose, the hilarity of which is further heightened by Jeeves’s typical sober and sensible way out of alt difficulties.

Based on the original character, "Jeeves” created by P. G. Woclchouse, the film was directed by Eugene Forde, with John Slone as associate producer. Faced with the task of filling the real-life shoes of P. G. Woclehousc's famous Jeeves, Twentieth CenturyFox executives, in choosing the unusually tall Arthur Treacher, discovered the most successful incarnation of a story figure ever brought to the screen. The chief figure in. countless witty and 'engaging stories or the ui usual difficulties of rather scatter-brained members of the British upper classes, Jeeves became so familiar to an international host of readers that it becomes even more surprising to find an actor to look and play the part so perfectly as does Treacher.. Exceptionally tall, sober-faced, and highly reserved in appearance. Treacher has played hundreds of English butler roles. As Jeeves, he is the screen’s first servant star.