The Love Test – 1935 | 63mins | Romance, Comedy | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Mary Lee is appointed head of a laboratory looking for a process to fireproof celluloid. Resentful of her position, Thompson and his male colleagues plan to make her fall in love with John so that she will neglect her work, but the couple really do fall in love. Thompson tricks Mary into firing John just as he has discovered the formula, and attempts to claim the work as his own, but Mary realises what has happened and John is reinstated.

Made for Fox-British at Wembley Studios, The Love Test is a lightweight but enjoyable romantic comedy with several notable features. Star Louis Hayward was soon bound for Hollywood and a starring career in swashbucklers like The Man in the Iron Mask and Son of Monte Cristo. ‘He was a business man really and did very well in Hollywood’, said Powell, who also claimed The Love Test as ‘the first appearance of Bernard Miles in films or anywhere else for that matter’. Googie Withers featured as a flirtatious secretary (‘Brings sunshine into dull lives, makes the bald grow hair!’) in her second film for Powell, while the handling of a sequence showing the ‘glamorising’ of the attractive Judy Gunn by her sophisticated neighbour Kathleen (Eve Turner) can be seen as a forerunner to the erotic transformation of Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus 12 years later. Another of Powell’s films rediscovered in the late 1980s, The Love Test was screened at the 1990 London Film Festival.