Storm in a Teacup (Victor Saville Productions, London Film Productions, 1937)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran Charles and I the fourth movie in the Vivien Leigh boxed set I’d got from American Movie Classics many years ago, a 1937 Alexander Korda production called Storm in a Teacup that turned out to be a quite funny British screwball comedy and not as much a respite from all the political coverage as I’d hoped for, since the movie’s central character turned out to be a local version of Donald Trump. Though the film’s ostensible stars were Vivien Leign and Rex Harrison, the real central character is Provost William Gow (Cecil Parker) -- a “provost” in this case is the Scottish equivalent of a mayor and Gow is the provost of Baikie (pronounced “Bakey”), a small village on the west coast of Scotland. Gow has built a city hall that looks more like a church than a government building -- indeed, I suspect that Korda had a standing set of the front of a church that they used for this film -- and within it he runs the meetings of the local city council with an iron hand, pushing through the agenda items he supports and not letting the ones he doesn’t come to a vote at all, sort of like Mitch McConnell. Gow also has designs for higher office -- he’s hoping that he will be the first Prime Minister of an independent Scottish parliament -- and when he’s not actually running the town he spends endless hours practicing the speeches he plans to give when he campaigns for that office as a member of the “New Party.” There was actually a short-lived “New Party” in Britain in the early 1930’s -- it was organized by Oswald Mosley before he “outed” himself and founded the British Union of Fascists, and it attracted some pretty high-powered intellectuals, notably author Lytton Strachey, but never amounted to much as a national force. I’m not sure whether this film’s writers, Leo Dalrymple and Donald Bull, adapting a play by Bruno Frank and with humorist James Bridie credited for “Anglo-Scottish adaptation,” intended a reference to Mosley’s party. But given how much William Gow is depicted as a petty fascist, one could readily believe he’d align himself with these quirkier aspects of the British Right.

Rex Harrison plays Frank Burdon, an English reporter who has come to town for a job with the Baikie Advertiser, and for his first assignment he’s required to interview Provost Gow. He comes to Gow’s home -- where he’s startled to find that the woman he started cruising on the boat taking him to Baikie and now wants to pursue in earnest -- is Gow’s daughter Victoria (Vivien Leigh). He also notes that Gow doesn’t want to be interviewed in the normal sense of the word; he wants to give his stump speech and have Burdon transcribe it word-for-word and print it in his paper. Only while he’s at the Gow home it’s visited by Honoria Hegarty (Sara Allgood), and Irish-born woman who works on the street selling ice cream and whose dog Patsy (an important enough role that “Scruffy,” the dog who played him, is listed in the credits) has been impounded by Provost Gow. He’s imposed a five-pound fine on Honoria because she never got a license for the dog, and now Gow is insisting that Patsy be destroyed. Burdon learns all of this when Honoria comes to Gow’s home and makes a heartfelt plea for the life of Patsy -- and though he has to sneak the story into the paper while his editor is out of the office, Burdon writes the story and soon the entire town is either laughing at Gow or horrified that he’s about to order a dog killed for such a silly reason. At Gow’s next city council meeting the townspeople heckle him by making dog noises, and the next time Gow tries to hold a meeting and speak all the dog owners in town get their dogs to fill the place, disrupt the meeting and force Gow to flee with hundreds of dogs chasing him.

Directed by Victor Saville (who made the masterly Jessie Matthews dance musicals in the mid-1930’s and later came to the U.S., mostly as a producer, though he directed the quite good MGM adaptation of John Galsworthy’s first Forsyte novel, That Forsyte Woman, in 1949) and Ian Dalrympie, Storm in a Teacup is a marvelous film, with loopy satires of politically correct language that ring true even today: when Victoria refers to her people as “Scotch” and her dad corrects her and says “Scottish,” she fires back, “I’ll have a Scottish and soda.” Later, in a diner, faced with a yucky-looking bowl of porridge as the only local breakfast item, Burdon says, “The English feed oats to horses and the Scots feed them to men” -- a parody, Charles told me, of an old proverb, “The English breed great horses; the Scottisn breed great men.” One of the things I like about this movie is how well it dramatizes the conflicts between Britain’s various ethnicities: the fact that Burdon is English and Hagerty is Irish marks them both as outsiders, not “really” part of Baikie. In the end, of course, Provost Gow grows a conscience, Patsy is saved (there’s an interesting bit of dialogue about how he saw a “bitch” -- presumably meaning they made some puppies, which would complicate the situation even further), and Burdon and Victoria -- who’s already lied in court (though not under oath) and said she and Burdon were married so she doesn’t have to testify against him in the trial in which Provost Gow is having him prosecuted for slander -- actually do get married and ride off together.

Storm in a Teacup was Vivien Leigh’s seventh out of only 19 films -- St. Martin’s Lane was her ninth and her last before Gone With the Wind (and her performance in St. Martin’s Lane has a ferocity that makes it look like she was warming up for Scarlett O’Hara and which she didn’t match in Storm in a Teacup two films earlier, though she’s quite pleasant and charming in a sort of voice-of-reason ingenue part); for someone who got such an enormous break in her first U.S.-made movie, she and her then-husband Laurence Olivier were both of the British acting school that regarded the stage as their true calling and films as something you did to fill in time between plays and make a little extra money.