"A surprise request from PFA audiences last time was for a Pauline Lord vehicle. There aren't too many of them actually, but this is one of the most enjoyable, what might have been a Madame X type soap-opera redeemed by good taste, intelligent acting and direction, and a surprisingly effectively-created London milieu." Lord plays an impoverished London bookshop owner, Clarissa Phipps, who sets out to make her only son a gentleman. She begins by taking in a Hyde Park-bench "aristocrat" (Basil Rathbone) so that her boy might assimilate his airs. "Hollywood often did extremely well by British-located stories in the 30's, very frequently much better than the British themselves and, as in this film, they certainly made the most of Hollywood's British colony. Rathbone, as always, is not given to much British restraint, but it's good to see him in an off-beat and sympathetic role, and it's also interesting to see David Niven and Wendy Barrie at the beginning of their Hollywood careers already (respectively) self-assured and very lovely. The English milieu is warm and evocative, if not always totally accurate: Hyde Park's political agitators work in the daytime, not at night!" -- W.K. Everson