Gertrude Lawrence made all too few appearances on film despite her overwhelming stage stardom, and far too few comedies where she excelled (rather like America's great Tallulah Bankhead, perhaps best remembered today in one of her last roles, Alfred Hitchcock's LIFEBOAT). This was Lawrence's one time working with Hitchcock, but not as director, merely as producer. Lawrence, master of the light comedy and musical (the very young may know her thanks to cast albums as the original "Mrs. Anna" in Rodgers & Hammerstein's KING AND I at the end of her life), may best be remembered on film for her serious dramatic performance in Tennessee Williams' GLASS MENAGERIE.
The film, not formally released on home video, is well worth tracking down for her lighter performance as the doomed ex-vaudevillian wife of a Lord as well as those of top billed Gerald Du Maurier as her doctor, Benita Hume as the nurse accused of her murder and Nigel Bruce as her wayward husband. Possibly even more worth seeking out is the film made four years later which showed Lawrence at her glamorous best as the wife of an actor sharing the London stage with her as the title character and Desdimona in Shakespeare's Othello (MEN ARE NOT GODS also starring top billed Miriam Hopkins). Lawrence gets to sing in both films.
One can only hope that *someone* finds a print of the next film Lawrence made after this one - 1933's light comedy NO FUNNY BUSINESS - which co-starred a very young Laurence Olivier and Jill Esmond who had co-starred with Lawrence and Noel Coward two years earlier in Coward's PRIVATE LIVES in both London and New York! Wouldn't that be something to see!!
LORD CAMBER'S LADIES is drawn from H.A. Vachelli's 1915 London hit THE CASE OF LADY CAMBER which starred Mary Bolard in the disappointing 1917 Broadway run (48perf. at the Lyceum, 26March-19May), and that extra level of background may peak mystery fans' interest - seeing in this early depression era filming what a hit murder mystery looked like at the height of WWI. This is something of a must for serious theatre aficionados.
