Men Are Not Gods

Another of the movies that I've had on my DVR for quite some time is Men Are Not Gods. Recently, I finally got around to watching it to do a review on it here.

Miriam Hopkins was borrowed by the Korda brothers' London Film Studios to star; she plays Ann Williams, a secretary at a London newspaper to drama critic T.H. Skeates (A.E. Matthews). Skeates is a bit of an eccentric in that he never reads any of the newspapers, not even his own, and not even to see the reviews of the plays he's watching. Most recently, he's watched a revival of Shakespeare's Othello, starring Edmond Davey (Sebastian Shaw) as the Moor of Venice. Skeates hated it, largely down to Davey's poor performance.

Coming in to the newspaper to complain is Barbara Halford (Gertrude Lawrence), an actress who played Desdemona in the play. It turns out that she's also the wife of one Edmond Davey, so she knows how much the bad reviews are going to hurt him, she putting it down to opening-night jitters. She meets Ann, and begs Ann not to run Skeates' review. And since Skeates never actually reads the reviews in the paper, how is he going to know if the wrong review was inserted into the paper? Ann, shockingly enough, decides to go along with the ruse.

Unsurprisintly, Skeates does find out, and that's the end of Ann's job at the paper. Going to see the play for herself, she's noticed by Barbara, and Barbara does Ann a bit of a favor by introducing her to Edmond, now that the play is becoming a bit of a success.

Complications arise, of course, as Ann winds up falling in love with Edmond after going to the theater to watch him in Othello dozens of times. And the feeling also turns out to be mutual. But Ann isn't a bad person, and doesn't want to have the affair at first. She's just going to need a kick in the pants to stop it once it begins, and that comes when Barbara tells Ann that she's pregnant. However, Ann's method of trying to get Edmond to go back to his wife doesn't quite go as planned....

Men Are Not Gods is the sort of movie that, had it been made in Hollywood, would have been a programmer. It's competently made, and well-enough acted, although there's nothing here that would ever raise it to the level of a prestige picture or be remembered as one of the great movies in the career of any of its cast. The one possible exception might be a young Rex Harrison, playing one of Ann's coworkers at the newspaper; he was on the way up and this picture did nothing to hurt that.

Nothing of what I said in the last paragraph, however, should be construed as saying I didn't like Men Are Not Gods. I think anybody who likes 1930s movies, and especially people interested in British movies of the period, will enjoy the movie.