Bitter Sweet

Noël Coward and Herbert Wilcox have combined here to create an engaging little musical romance with a couple of memorable songs and a gently bubbling screenplay. Told by way of a retrospective, Anna Neagle is "Sarah" who marries the penniless musician "Carl" (Fernand Gravey) and heads to Venice where they eke out a meagre living until he is offered a job conducting a small orchestra and she sings along. Her talents manage to attract the unwanted attentions of "Capt. Lutte" (Miles Mander) and very shortly afterwards, things take a tragic turn. It's got something of the silent movie about it - there are extended scenes with no dialogue, and both Neagle and Mander offer us a degree of gesturing that wouldn't have looked out of place ten years earlier. At times this does hold the pace back but we also have Ivy St. Helier's sultry "Manon la Crevette" who delivers "If Love Were All" and Neagle is quite robust singing "I'll See You Again". It was remade with more money and colour, but I'm not sure it needed either. This is quite an entertaining 90 minutes.