Word: pettigrew
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...fantastic and it is this quality that makes it both extraordinary and different as movies go. In the story a young chap from the twentieth country, Leslie Howard by name, projects himself into the eighteenth century there to live over again the romance of ancestor Peter Standish and Helen Pettigrew. Complications are presented in prophetic remarks that so uncannily diagnose the future and which he so inopportunely drops along the way. Throughout, of course, there is a philosophical background which contends that eternity is one in the mind of God and that the past, present, and future ever exist there...
Berkeley Square (Fox). Peter Standish, a young American living in a London house inherited from his British forbears, finds himself one afternoon in a situation dear to romantic playwrights: transported into the Past. In his drawing room he finds the Pettigrew family, comfortably sure that they are living in the 18th Century. It appears to them that he is an earlier Peter Standish, their Colonial cousin, back from the Revolution, engaged to marry Kate Pettigrew. It is a stormy day and the Pettigrews are a little astonished to find, when Peter Standish walks in, that his feet...
Presently the Pettigrews have further cause for astonishment. Peter Standish uses words like "cockeyed," "cigaret," "tank." He sits to Sir Joshua Reynolds, praises as his masterpiece a portrait not yet completed. He bewilders the Duchess of Devonshire with epigrams from Oscar Wilde, offends her by the historical tone of his compliments. He is not interested in Kate Pettigrew. He loves her sister Helen but he knows, from old diaries, that Peter Standish married Kate and Helen died when she was very young. Faced by the wry problem of an emotion at once timeless and defeated, Peter Standish finally finds himself...
...with the times-did a first-rate job which began with hiring Frank Lloyd, who made Cavalcade, to direct; borrowing Leslie Howard, who played the rôle in John Balderston's play, to act Peter Standish; using a new British ingénue, Heather Angel, for Helen Pettigrew. Heather Angel's name is not a pseudonym. Daughter of an Oxford lecturer who was killed in the War, she attended a London dramatic school, took to the stage when its headmistress died. Her first real part was in the London stage production of The Sign of the Cross...
...major complications arise from the fact that the past can not be changed. In spite of his love for a certain Miss Helen Pettigrew, Margalo Gilmore, he realizes that he is destined to marry her sister, for that is how it has happened. The humor and dramatic tenseness that arises from the futility of the situation are the main virtues of the play. The author has realized the force of climax and situation and every scene closes with a subtle gesture that completely wins the audience. At the juncture at which the Twentieth century Peter Standish arrives, the stage...