Raffles

Cracks Lyrical

Raffles
USA 1930 
Directed by George Fitzmaurice 
& Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast
Sam Goldwyn Company
Warner Archives DVD Region 1

and

Raffles
USA 1939 
Directed by Sam Wood & William Wyler
Sam Goldwyn Company
Warner Archives DVD Region 1

A. J. Raffles, the gentleman thief and renowned cricketer, was created by E. W. Hornung (brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) in 1899 in a series of four books, most of which were his collected short stories about the character. Then, in 1903, he wrote a self contained play about the character called Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman. And it’s this play which both the first English friendly talking version of the film, Raffles in 1930 and its remake, also called Raffles in 1939, were based. 

This DVD set from Warner Archives in the US is fascinating because, it gives some insight, as you watch it, into how things can be both the same and quite different simultaneously. The story is identical for both... Raffles decides to give up his life as a gentleman thief to marry Gwen, the gal of his dreams. However, his best friend Bunny Manders is in debt and so Raffles decides to do one last job at a party of a well to do friend. Then, another thief gets intertwined in his shenanigans and eventually the chief inspector on the case, sets a thief to catch a thief... and finally gets Raffles to confess to the crime, once Manders has received the reward money. However, Raffles then does a runner and escapes the long arm of the law. 

So a very simple story and the first version of it stars Ronald Coleman in the title role with Kay Francis as Gwen and, with not too much screen time, Bramwell Fletcher as Bunny (Fletcher’s role in The Mummy, two years later and reviewed by me here, would be even shorter, as he goes mad once Karloff takes his first steps from his sarcophagus). The direction is pretty interesting and it speeds along at a nice pace, it has to be said. Coleman is somewhat thoughtful as Raffles and David Torrence as Inspector McKenzie gives him a good run for his money. 

There are some things which don’t go down quite right. It’s an American movie purporting to be set in England but, the party guests all drink brandy instead of port after dinner. Not really the done thing at the time... although brandy was also drunk after dinner by some. However, there’s some nice ‘screwball comedy’ moments such as a wonderful exchange between Raffles and McKenzie when McKenzie states that someone is ‘a’ something or other instead of ‘the’. Raffles questions, “A?” Mckenzie answers, “Aye!” and Raffles concludes the exchange with “Oh!”... which I thought was particularly good. The same A-I-O dialogue is almost repeated in the remake but, it’s a bit off... I’ll get to that in a minute because it’s reflective of the whole production. But I liked this version of the story well enough and was pleasantly entertained by it.

The 1939 remake, from which the film’s leading actor was given special extension of leave to finish before going off to the Second World War as a new recruit, is kind of a much polished version of the same story. And it’s interesting because the running time is exactly the same, 1 hour and 12 minutes long, but this much more sparkly ‘do over’ seems somehow duller and less pacier in comparison. The great David Niven plays Raffles and Gwen is played in this version by Olivia de Havilland. Lots of the stage direction is the same but characters are excised and replaced while situations bearing the same ultimate results are arrived at in different ways, where a lot of the fat is trimmed away from the same script (used as an initial starting point). It’s curious, then, just as to why this version, with far better acting and production values, seems a trifle dull in comparison to the original. 

A nice thing that demonstrates this is the ‘A-I-O’ joke from the earlier version. It’s almost the same dialogue exchange between Raffles and McKenzie but, for some reason, an extra line of dialogue is added after the “Aye!” before you get to the “Oh!”. Thus ruining the joke of three lines of dialogue each representing a vowel. Did the new script writers (one of them rumoured to be an uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald) just not get the expedient joke?

Anyway, the second version is still highly watchable but, for my money, it’s the first, rawer Ronald Coleman version which comes out as the superior film. The pre-code ending where Raffles gets away with it is somewhat downplayed in the remake, when it’s intimated that the gentleman in question will be going to give himself up to the Inspector once the credits have rolled. Which I think says it all about how pre-code movies spoiled everyone’s fun. The two Raffles are available in the US on one DVD from the Warner Archives label, should you be tempted.