“I’m a dreamer, aren’t we all?”: so went one of Hollywood’s popular songs of 1929.  The phrase certainly fits the film’s hero, Monty Merton, a lowly worker on the factory floor of Quickthin Ltd., a company peddling a magic liquid dedicated to making the fat thin. Mischievous co-workers fool him into believing he’s become heir to a fortune, just when Quickthin needs an injection of cash, and the managing director’s daughter might be marrying a monocled twit called Eustace. Can Monty, in love with the daughter himself, avoid the calamities that usually befall him and ride to the rescue by taxi, sports car, bus, train, or possibly a picturesque biplane?
That is the plotline for Wait and See, Britain’s first feature-length film comedy to be shaped as a vehicle for a comic star. Walter Forde (1898-1984) wasn’t just Britain’s biggest film comedian of the 1920s. During that decade he was also, essentially, Britain’s only film comedian. A child of a theatrical family, first on stage as a baby, he initially earned his cinema spurs in one-reel, then two-reel, comedies, before breaking through into longer running times with Wait and See. Interviewed in 1927 in the Daily Film Renter, his backer and producer Archibald Nettlefold promised original stunts and gags, scenery “such as only England can produce”, and “a complement of very pretty girls”: a package he fully expected to compare favourably with anything imported from America. Once the film opened, audiences and industry observers reacted with relief. “A distinct success,” commented the Kinematograph Weekly, not at all influenced by the fact that its studio correspondent, Pat Mannock, devised the film’s pun-happy intertitles and co-wrote the story.
American parallels with Forde’s comic character were, and remain, hard to shake off.  From 1921, he’d appeared in shorts as “Walter”, an eager young man with a straw hat (slightly too small), baggy trousers, tight jacket, and an unassuming, ordinary face. He was always endeavouring to better his status, or win the fair lady, or both. It was a variation on the Harold Lloyd formula, presented with English settings plus a certain English modest demeanour. Another, more obvious difference with Lloyd was that Forde didn’t wear glasses. Commentators also compared him at times to Chaplin, Larry Semon (I don’t see it), and Reginald Denny. You may find a touch of W. C. Fields, too, when Walter takes to golf. None of these echoes harmed his popularity. Over time, “Walter” became sufficiently popular with the British public to require his own spin-offs and merchandise. They could follow his antics in comic-strip form. They could play with a stuffed “Walter” doll.
For some ten disappointing months in 1923, Forde worked in Hollywood himself, appearing with little success in several Universal one-reelers. But it’s obvious from his films that along with some Continental touches he usefully absorbed the American knack for snappy pacing, the precise timing of gags, and comedy’s need for incisive editing. The early scenes in Wait and See, establishing our hero’s character and factory routine, spin through multiple shots assembled with an easy flair not often found in British films of the time. And if the lengthy final chase to the altar seems a little repetitive now, the interweaving of trains, cars, winding roads, and a biplane is still managed with considerable and enjoyable aplomb.
Among the cast, Pauline Johnson as the heroine looks pleasant and pretty in a range of cloche hats: all, essentially, that her role requires. Character actor Sam Livesey brings warmth and gusto to his role as the Quickthin boss. Frank Stanmore is also personable, though I suspect he was more so in the uncut release prints. Walter himself springs through the film’s fooling with quick physical responses and appealing enthusiasm allied to a degree of British understatement. He doesn’t pull faces, or yank the heartstrings. He might not always be screamingly funny; but he’s something more rare in a comic: he’s actually likeable.
For all his years before the public, Forde was a shy man, and declared himself unhappy facing the camera’s gaze. After three more starring features, the last in 1930, he retreated behind the lens, quickly establishing himself in the sound era as a lively, reliable, and successful director of comedies and dramas throughout the 1930s and 40s. Ironically, his reign as a cinema star comic ended just as the floodgates opened and British cinema finally became swamped with comedians from music-hall, variety, the West End stage, and radio, spewing out puns and repartee, sticking out their bottoms, or noisily breaking crockery. All funny in its way; but it wasn’t Walter’s way.

Geoff Brown