dangermousie | Piccadilly Jim: delighfully insane

This is a still from the 1936 adaptation (starring Robert Montgomery and Madge Evans) of one of my favorite P.G. Wodehouse novels, Piccadilly Jim.

It's hilarious, it's sharply written, it's romantic, and it's utterly madcap. The plot? It's really too complicated to explain, but let me try. Jimmy Crocker is a former American journalist who now lives in England with his former actor father and his brand new stepmother, the formidable and rich Mrs. Van Brunt. Well, the hi-jinks ensue when he falls in love with Ann, the niece of the husband of Mrs. Van Brunt's sister and for reasons that are much too complicated has to impersonate the son of his father's butler impersonating himself. There are burglaries, romance and hilarity and this book has to be read to be believed.

You can find a version on Gutenberg, right here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/pccjm11.txt

How can you not love a book which starts like this:

The residence of Mr. Peter Pett, the well-known financier, on Riverside Drive is one of the leading eyesores of that breezy and expensive boulevard. As you pass by in your limousine, or while enjoying ten cents worth of fresh air on top of a green omnibus, it jumps out and bites at you. Architects, confronted with it, reel and throw up their hands defensively, and even the lay observer has a sense of shock. The place resembles in almost equal proportions a cathedral, a suburban villa, a hotel and a Chinese pagoda. Many of its windows are of stained glass, and above the porch stand two terra-cotta lions, considerably more repulsive even than the complacent animals which guard New York's Public Library. It is a house which is impossible to overlook: and it was probably for this reason that Mrs. Pett insisted on her husband buying it, for she was a woman who liked to be noticed.

Also, I would love a Jimmy of my own and as to Ann, the term "girl-crush" comes to mind.

The 1936 adaptation isn't very faithful (Jimmy is a cartoonist who has been satirizing Ann's family) and Madge Evans doesn't make a great Ann but I love it anyway because of it being true to the madcap spirt of the book, hilarious screen-play, oodles of really great character actors having a ball, and above all a deliciously sophisticated Robert Montgomery who was born to play an early Wodehouse hero (an unflappable, outrageous and charming young man of his early novels, not as in his later books, a nitwit).

More pictures from the movie behind the cut.