In 1793, Kitty Bellairs rides into the English seaside resort of Bath and into a whirlwind of romance with a bashful lord and a dashing highwayman. Add duels, disguises, a kidnapping, a jealous husband, a bounty of saucy tunes and a confectioner's shop of white powdered wigs and Kitty has all the adventure a pretty and flirtatious miss could hope for. Claudia Dell (the model for the first Columbia Pictures logo) and Walter Pidgeon headline this frothy operetta. Originally shot in color, Sweet Kitty Bellairs now exists only in black and white, relying on its sparkling cast, story and songs for vividness. Tally Ho! for stylish Early Talkie Era fun.
T**A
ok but not really qhat I expected.
The movie was a musical comedy. Music wasn't all that great and humor was not that funny.
A**7
Musical
I'd been looking for this movie for a while - - wanted to see what it was about.Not bad - musical with some merit
I**A
An Obscure but Delightful Early Musical
I want to thank Richard Barrios for praising this little gem in his definitive book "A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film." Otherwise I'd never have known about "Sweet Kitty Bellairs." Even if I had I might not have bothered. A 1930 screen operetta based on a 1903 play set in 18th century England--doesn't sound very enticing, does it? But "Sweet Kitty Bellairs" is genuinely sweet: an exquisitely stylized confection made by people well aware of the material's absurdity and delighted by its artificiality. Far from being a stuffy, sexless period piece, this is a saucy and buoyant pre-code escapade, free of cloying sentiment and reveling in the absurdities of powdered-wig codes of honor and sexual propriety.It's short and sweet too. Director Alfred E. Green keeps the story galloping for 63 minutes (with tracking shots of highwaymen singing on horseback). Considering the date, this is fluid and lively film-making, not at all stagy. The witty songs move the story along and don't try to be showstoppers. The lead actors (Claudia Dell, Walter Pidgeon, and baritone Perry Askam) sparkle with irony, but Ernest Torrence walks away with the film. Playing a cloddish jealous husband, he's delighted by the role's buffoonery, sputtering into falsetto at the ends of his lines. And as a former member of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, he knows how to sing! Alas, by the time "Sweet Kitty Bellairs" was released the public had been so glutted with bad musicals that it neglected the good ones. Hence the obscurity of this bonbon of a movie.
R**S
A curio for students of early Hollywood
Impossible to rate this item as it is so much of its time (1930) - I only sought it out because a family member who moved to Los Angeles late in life has a bit part in it. Originally in technicolor, this is a black and white transfer made for television in the 1950s. Mercifully only 63 minutes long, it includes references to pre-code [...] humour which will be of interest to students of the genre. It's basically a musical Regency romp set in Bath in 1793 in period costume, and the cast includes a young Walter Pidgeon.
Trustpilot
3 weeks ago
2 weeks ago
