Return To Yesterday – 1940 | 69 mins | Drama | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Robert Stevenson’s final Ealing film was Return to Yesterday, an adaptation of a play by the actor & playwright Robert Morley, Goodness How Sad. Clive Brook played a famous actor trapped in a loveless marriage who returns from success in America to the seaside town in which he started, for a nostalgic examination of his roots. Brook takes a sentimental journey to the provincial repertory theatre where he got his first break, only to discover that the little troupe is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Without revealing his true identity, he joins the actors and helps to get them over their financial hump. He falls in love with a struggling young actress, and then, in order to enable her to leave him for a younger man, acts the part of the cad in the traditional self-sacrificing manner. For Clive Brook the part was scarcely a challenge and Anna Lee was regarded as somewhat colourless as the actress.

When the film was finished Stevenson and his wife left for a Canadian holiday, and from there went on to Hollywood. Meanwhile the war began, and as Stevenson was a pacifist he did not return, staying in America to make Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Back Street. In more recent years he has worked exclusively for the Walt Disney Organisation, and made the classic film, Mary Poppins, released in 1965.

Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing.