Word: gaumont
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Thirty-Nine Steps (Gaumont-British) neatly converts its essential implausihility into an asset by stressing the difficulties which confront its hero when he tries to tell outsiders about the predicament he is in. A young Canadian named Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), he finds himself one evening, as the result of nothing more daring than a visit to a London music hall, entertaining in his fiat a girl who tells him that she is a counter-espionage agent protecting England from an international ring which is selling the secrets of the Air Ministry and that she has just committed a murder...
...that Dominion's Governor-General (TIME, Aug. 19). This high-placed connection made it possible for the British film industry to improve notably upon Hollywood methods of ballyhoo. The premiere of The Thirty-Nine Steps in London was preceded, not by a mere broadcast, but by a Gaumont-British banquet at which the guests of honor were Lord Tweedsmuir, Home Secretary Sir John Simon, Minister for Air Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister and their ladies...
...London, where the new company set about making pictures for Paramount and Gaumont-British release, Alexander Korda had a hard time until someone sent him a fat, pasty-faced young actor named Charles Laughton. To the derision of the whole British film industry, Producer Korda promptly cast Laughton as Henry VIII. He then persuaded United Artists to release the finished picture and last of all got together enough private capital to make it. The Private Life of Henry VIII made Laughton a superstar, launched the careers of Robert Donat, Binnie Barnes, Wendy Barrie and Merle Oberon, caused Korda...
...Clairvoyant (Gaumont-British), remotely suggested by an Ernst Lothar novel about a man who discovered he had the gift of detailed and exact prophecy, makes eerie entertainment out of the supernatural. Like The Scoundrel which needed two outright miracles for a happy ending, The Clairvoyant uses the modest method of understatement...
...Knew Too Much (Gaumont British) follows the formula of old Hollywood gangster pictures in its climactic scene which shows London's Wapping transformed into a shambles when the police bombard a gang of anarchists in their hideaway. Nonetheless, the picture can by no means be pigeonholed as a feeble foreign imitation of the films which many cinemaddicts found among the most satisfactory ever made in the U. S. Alfred Hitchcock's direction, in which the story is told in sharp, abbreviated sequences gathering speed steadily toward their explosive climax, makes The Man Who Knew Too Much...