Robert Montgomery In “The Earl of Chicago”

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21157, 5 July 1940, Page 4

Robert Montgomery In “The Earl of Chicago”

Robert Montgomery takes a further step along the road of playing character roles which started with "Night Must Fall," in this interesting but not wholly satisfactory picture. It has much of the same quality of "Night Must Fall” and gives Montgomery the role of Kilmount, a whisky racketeer in Chicago, who suddenly finds that he is an earl in his own right. He is taken to England by his lawyer, a man whom he had once framed and ends by murdering him. The film is treated in comedy vein until the tragic ending, but Robert Montgomery, as the gangster, makes you feel a touch of the sinister from the very beginning; it is a very good performance. The arrival in England is treated farcically, as are the earl’s visit to his ancestral castle, where the butler stirs in him the feeling of tradition. The old retainer business is rather overdone and is not always convincing, more especially .in. the last scene in which Kilmount goes to his death on Tower Hill in a Court suit, after being tried by his peers for murder. A glance at his tradition-bound butler sends him to the scaffold erect and dignified. However, there are many very human touches and a certain amount of nostalgia for a period that is nearly past. The sequence in which the gangster takes his seat in the House of Lords is excellently done and so is the trial. Edward Arnold scores heavily as the lawyer who, under the cloak of friendship, financially ruins the man who had sent him to prison. Edmund Gwenn is kindly as the butler who tries to instil a sense of his new position into the ex-rack-eteer.