Often billed as a drama but obviously a farce, The Price of Wisdom is a British “quota quickie”, one of many films churned out in the 1930s to shore up domestic production. “Quota quickie” is usually a useful synonym for “pile of crap” but this is an exception and if you’re on the lookout for a delightfully eccentric, highly tweedy, very British old-school light comedy, your train has just pulled in.
There’s enough plot to power a two-hour movie and the only real argument you could mount against this 66-minute film is that it has to move too fast to get everything in. The actors are literally gabbling their lines to keep up with the pace.
The plot goes like this. Rich bright Jean (Mary Newland) leaves her ancestral home determined to become a useful member of society. With the blessing of her mother (Mary Jerrold) and her mother’s secret boyfriend, Colonel Jim Layton (Eric Cowley), she heads for London hoping to get a job. But before she can gad about, or sow any wild oats, she meet an older man, Alfred Blake (Robert Rendel), who first offers her a job and later proposes marriage. Enter younger, smarter Peter North (Powell and Pressburger favourite Roger Livesey), an inventor Jean decides to bankroll because she is idealistic and has the money, plus she admires Peter’s gumption and his brains. Or is it something more? Etc etc etc.
Positions established, Jean and Alfred and Peter work their way through various scenarios – the marriage is on, it’s off, it’s on again (for all the wrong reasons) – with a complication arriving in the shape of a lawsuit Alfred takes out against Peter for industrial espionage. Everything eventually shakes down once the action has shifted back from London to Jean’s family’s estate, where well-bred chaps go hunting and fishing, deerstalkers are worn and servants do all the work.
There’s some shots taken at shortsighted British businessmen always trying to make a fast buck – Alfred’s leather goods are very poor quality (“compressed seaweed” one angry customer says) – but in the main the film proceeds in beautifully written and played romantic “two scenes” between Jean and Alfred and Jean and Peter. Comedy work is mostly done in other “two scenes”. Jean’s dotty mother and the daffily eccentric Jim in the country. While in London the laughs are provided by Alfred Blake’s clerk, the Dickensian Mr Pollit (Ivor Barnard), and his secretary, Dickensian spinster Miss Stokes (Ann Codrington).
Laughs isn’t quite the right word. This is dry and wry rather than laugh-out loud, with quite a lot of the humour coming from lines said under the breath. In different hands it would be a satire – a rich young woman relentlessly failing upwards – but that wasn’t the way of the British movie biz of the 1930s. Here, class hierarchies here are rigid and rich people have delightful lives because they deserve them.
Mary Newland (whose original name was, bizarrely, Oldland) was married to Reginald Denham, this film’s director. She’s probably a bit old to be playing a bright young thing but she pulls it off with a breezy insouciance in one of the last films of her career. The entire cast, though, are troopers, stage veterans who have this sort of thing in their DNA.
A young woman tries to be modern and completely fails at it. You can’t imagine the likes of Katharine Hepburn signing up for The Price of Wisdom, but then that’s partly the joy of it. Beneath the cut-glass accents, double barrel shotguns and whisky and sodas it’s a strangely subversive film.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
