This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

One of my all time favorites.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I recently saw this ancient British film again after a 30 year hiatus. Luckily it was the recent DVD from NETWORK with possibly the best surviving print that I saw. I won't repeat the complex plot (every reviewer on IMDb seems compelled to reprise film plots for some reason), apart from saying that the narrative binds together a group of disparate characters over a 24 hour period, each with his/her own story, much like the later films TALES OF MANHATTAN (1942) FLESH AND FANTASY (1943) DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) BOND STREET (1948) etc. This film is probably the first talkie to use such a device and its cast is stuffed with famous stars of the early 1930s. Which makes spotting familiar faces (if you are a film buff) part of the fun of watching this.Its main attraction for me though, is that it offers a tantalizing glimpse of London as it was almost 90 years ago, a London and a way of life in Britain that has vanished completely. The street and railway station scenes, the atmosphere on a typical London bus of that time with a conductor, and the whole ambiance of the film are priceless. It also provides Max Miller with perhaps his best screen role, allowing him to demonstrate his astonishing facility for rapid-fire dialogue that would not have been out of place at Warner Brothers in the mid 1930s. Think Pat O'Brien and James Cagney in such films as BOY MEETS GIRL and CEILING ZERO and then watch Max do his stuff. He's terrific and easily competes with them.Some scenes creak today as one would expect, but for the most part, this is a vivid, highly entertaining little film that deserves to be far better known than it is.

This film is a splendid achievement, weaving together satisfactorily as it does the stories of a group of people preceding their coming together one fatal evening on a London Number 134 bus. The evening is that of Friday the thirteenth, and disaster occurs, as lightning strikes a crane and causes it to come crashing down onto the bus. Two people are killed, but we are not allowed to know which two until the end of the film's multiple flashbacks. Numerous well known actors of the period appear in this ensemble drama. One character, a slippery and unctuous crook named Blake who 'lives by his wits', is superbly played by Emlyn Williams, who also wrote the electric and crackling dialogue for this film. The wit and quickness of the complex dialogue helps to give this film a much deeper dimension. The young female lead is played by Jessie Matthews, who is as charming as her audience at the time would have expected, considering how popular she was then, and indeed deserved to be. The film is wonderfully directed by Victor Saville. He had already worked with Matthews and would do so again, as he would with Emlyn Williams the following year. The multi-stories are really well-structured and take place in a variety of locations. This gives us a treat, for we are able to see many areas of London as they were in 1932. I noticed for instance that the price of a payphone call at that time was only tuppence. And on the bus itself, someone asks for 'a penny ticket' but then realizes he has been robbed of all his money before boarding the bus, so Emlyn Williams, feeling flush after a blackmail payoff, holds up a single copper and gives it to the bus conductor. Yes, bus conductors! And how we miss them! They were always good for a laugh and some banter, as well as useful advice on which was really the best stop, and how to change, and how long everything would take. I am only surprised that bus conductors, although long gone, have not also been replaced by call centres in India so that people are asked on their mobile phones to press 1, 2, 3, or 4, for their travel advice nowadays, since humans have gone out of fashion. There are many fine performances in the film, such as by Ralph Richardson and Max Miller the music hall comedian. We see extensive shots of the old Caledonian Market at its original site off Caledonian Road in Islington, which closed when the Second World War began. (After the War it reopened at Bermondsey.) There is indeed a great deal to see of Pre-War London, and a great deal to enjoy from a very fine film.

Actually Friday the thirteenth was a lucky date for Jessie Matthews – that was the night in February 1925 in Toronto that she became a leading lady of the stage at 17 years old after understudying Gertrude Lawrence. I hadn't seen this little film gem since the '90's - UK Channel 4 used to screen a good quality copy - but remembered it word for word. Plenty of British films from the early '30's are either thoughtful or entertaining, this managed to be both although technologically (and logically) as primitive as usual.London midnight bus crashes into a building to avoid a falling crane and two of its passengers are killed. A rather flimsy Big Ben rewinds to the morning and we begin to see retrospectively unfolding the various and varied lives of the people involved in the crash and what led to them being on the bus. It was a talkie remake of a 1929 film The Bridge At San Luis Rey regarding a collapsing bridge and the people who were either affected or killed. So, there's a good tight script flashing between all the characters, and what a set of characters! Jessie Matthews as a wide-eyed "non stop" hoofer and her then brand new husband Sonnie Hale as the cynical bus conductor, Ralph Richardson played her lover as an energetic school teacher (and they apparently got on very well on set too), babe in the park Robertson Hare, Edmund Gwenn, Max Miller with some of his fastest ever patter, Hartley Power, the film's co-scriptwriter Emlyn Williams as a sinister blackmailer, and many other British regulars were in attendance. You might have some fun trying to work out who might end up dead, but ultimately it all follows fairly conventional moral lines – one end just, the other bittersweet. If remade nowadays of course this film's probable ending would be that a character playing a mass-murdering pervert would be the only one to survive – and would not be meant as irony but as a happy ending.Jessie had such a busy year in 1933 she collapsed with nervous exhaustion which made the commencement of the shooting of her classic Evergreen difficult – FTT turned out to be a different type of classic. It's a simple and perfectly packed potpourri of tales, to be sure it displays the mores, prejudices and snobbery of the time but the basic tales can all be still applied to today and are engrossing to watch from start to finish.

There's something to be said for the dozens of methods of public transportation and the billions of stories which arise out of them every day in every city lucky enough to have them. For the dozen or so people on the London bus just before midnight ironically on Friday the Thirteenth during a horrible thunderstorm, their fates will all be questioned with the sudden collapse of a construction crane.Like the oft-filmed "The Bridge of San Luis Rey", this flashes back to the last 24 hours of their lives up to this point, but here, there were only two fatalities and only a few injuries. An all-star cast of British actors (some familiar to American audiences from later films) run the gamut of types from sleazy blackmailer, busy businessman, an ex-con, sexy chorus girl, philandering husband and a dizzy wife who keeps forgetting to re-order the marmalade. Moods swing from light comedy to heavy drama and other sequences hold the interest more than others. Mary Jerrold is adorable as the sweet businessman's wife who spends most of the film fretting over a letter she forgot to deliver. Future "Santa" Edmund Gwenn is the frustrated husband tired of his aging wife's forgetfulness who doesn't realize that with the strike of lightning and the nearing strike of the Tower of London's clock at midnight, fate might strike a blow to his life which would change the course of his life. Musical comedy favorite Jessie Matthews gets a few delicious wisecracks as a basically innocent chorus girl who still knows a few things about men to keep them in line.Fortunately, if you forget about the opening sequence just before the accident, you will have the opportunity to re-visit it with more details once you get to know who is who. The end is one of those great moments of coincidence, a tag-line involving two characters who were not a part of the accident, and a view of what the real definition of fate really is.