When I think about whom to cast as Lord Peter Wimsey, I think of someone skilled at playing silly-ass aristocrats. I know that Ian Carmichael appeared in several television adaptations of Sayers' Wimsey novels in the 1970s, and I hope to have a chance to see them some day. For this one, they might have cast one of the Aldwych farceurs: Ralph Lynn (the descriptions of Lord Peter in the earlier novels make him sound like Lynn) or Claude Hulbert. Instead, MGM originally cast Robert Donat after his success in GOODBYE MR. CHIPS and, when he dropped out, used the visiting Robert Montgomery -- a fine actor, but not really suited for the role. Then they rewrote it so that Peter and Harriet (played by Constance Cummings) were more like Nick and Nora Charles in this hash of BUSMAN'S HONEYMOON.
Sigh. I'd still like to see Sayers' story done right, but that's not going to happen any time soon. Instead, I'll take some small comfort in the supporting characters. Leslie Banks as Lord Peters' philosophical brother-in-law, reduced to an admiring acoylite; Seymour Hicks, really too old for Buntner, but playing the imperturbable butler. Frank Pettingell is fine as the jack-of-all-trades Puffett, and Robert Newton as Frank Crutchley. Like many another movie "adapted" from another medium, bearing only a passing relationship to the original, I force myself to look at it as something having nothing at all to do with the source material, and find it pretty good on its own account.
Sigh. I'd still like to see Sayers' story done right, but that's not going to happen any time soon. Instead, I'll take some small comfort in the supporting characters. Leslie Banks as Lord Peters' philosophical brother-in-law, reduced to an admiring acoylite; Seymour Hicks, really too old for Buntner, but playing the imperturbable butler. Frank Pettingell is fine as the jack-of-all-trades Puffett, and Robert Newton as Frank Crutchley. Like many another movie "adapted" from another medium, bearing only a passing relationship to the original, I force myself to look at it as something having nothing at all to do with the source material, and find it pretty good on its own account.