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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
There is a moment, roughly two-thirds through But a Butler!, when Vera Reynolds’ pupils dilate in a close-up so intimate you can count the amber flecks. The camera holds for an eternity—four, maybe five seconds—and the silence swells until you realize the film itself is eavesdropping on us. That breach of etiquette, that reversal of the voyeuristic contract, is the whole movie in microcosm: the servant not only watches but rewrites the spectators.
The Devereux townhouse, cobbled together from leftover sets of The Raven and a Parisian opera house, creaks with ancestral guilt. Notice how the wallpaper’s fleur-de-lis pattern reappears on the butler’s waistcoat buttons—an echo chamber where décor and domicile conspire. Hal Mohr’s chiaroscuro doesn’t merely sculpt faces; it carves out negative space so cavernous you could fall in. When Lillian descends the grand staircase, her silhouette is swallowed by an iris shot that shrinks to the size of a monocle, turning the heroine into a specimen under glass.
Barry, best known for slapstick two-reelers, weaponizes his comic timing here; every deferential nod lands like a thrown gauntlet. Watch the way he polishes a brandy snifter—circular, hypnotic, almost erotic—while delivering exposition about his war years. The circular motion continues in a jump-cut to Lillian’s corset being laced: two bodies bound by the same invisible thread. It’s a master-class in substitutionary montage that would make Eisenstein jealous.
Reynolds, often dismissed as a decorative flapper, operates here like a seismograph of the idle rich. Her eyelids flutter at different speeds depending on whether she’s bored, cornered, or sexually curious—an alphabet of micro-gestures. In the library scene she fingers a first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal; the dust she disturbs swirls into a shaft of light, momentarily forming the shape of a question mark. The film never answers it, but by then the question has metastasized inside us.
Released mere months before The Jazz Singer, But a Butler! is a fossil from the final age of universal silence. Yet its lack of synchronized dialogue feels like a strategic choice, not a limitation. The intertitles, letterpressed on cream stock flecked with gold, appear irregularly—sometimes mid-action, sometimes a full four beats after a character’s lips move, creating a dislocating echo. The effect is uncanny: we read what we thought we heard, a ghost track of nonexistent voices.
Censors snoozed through production, blind to the sapphic charge between Lillian and her live-in ‘companion’ Mabel. Their scenes are shot in two-shots so tight their knees touch the frame line, and when Mabel helps Lillian into a velvet evening cloak, the camera tilts down to catch the pulse in Mabel’s throat hammering like a hummingbird. The butler, ever the social cartographer, exploits this unspoken desire, forging letters that frame Mabel as a blackmailer, thereby erasing the one confidante who could have saved Lillian.
Unlike The Inferior Sex, which lectures us about economic disparity, But a Butler! stages class warfare as sleight of hand. Arthur Grimble’s backstory—an orphan swapped at birth with the real heir—mirrors Lillian’s fear that her own pedigree is forged. The film’s central coup is to suggest that identity itself is a butler: it serves whoever can afford the livery. When the final shot reveals Arthur lounging in the master’s chair, legs crossed atop a tiger-skin rug, the triumph is not personal but systemic; the house has metabolized another host.
Moths recur like repressed memories—fluttering against sconces, drowning in champagne coupes, pinned under glass in the conservatory. Their powdery wings leave smudges on white waistcoats, a spectral signature of contamination. Conversely, monograms proliferate: ‘D’ embroidered onto napkins, cufflinks, even the butler’s long johns (revealed in a risqué shirt-tug). By the time Lillian discovers her own initials freshly engraved on Arthur’s cuff, the insignia has become a brand of ownership.
The editing rhythm mimics a heartbeat in arrears: long languorous takes punctuated by surgical cuts. The disappearance sequence cross-cuts between the fox hunt—hooves thundering across a soundstage moor—and Lillian inside a mirrored boudoir where every reflection shows her back. The cumulative effect is a Möbius strip of pursuit: the more she tries to exit the frame, the deeper she intrudes into the butler’s design.
For decades the film slumbered in a Czech asylum archive, mislabeled as Le Valet Maudit. The 2018 4K restoration by EYE Filmmuseum unearthed an amber-tinted print that reveals the warm glow of gaslight on Reynolds’ cheekbones previously lost in dupe grays. The restored score—composed by Ravel’s student Lucienne Delyle—features a glass harmonica that trembles like a neurotic spine, accentuating the uncanny.
Where Restless Souls externalizes guilt through Expressionist sets, But a Butler! internalizes it via performance. Fans of The Lifted Veil will savor the same toxic intimacy, yet here the veil is not death but service. And if you thrilled at the class upheaval in Penge, multiply the subversion by the square root of a tuxedo.
To watch But a Butler! is to consent to a transfusion of ice and fire: your bourgeois certainties replaced by the chill realization that the hand pouring your coffee might tomorrow sign your checks. Ninety-eight years after its premiere, the film still whispers a seditious truth—good help is not hard to find; it’s simply waiting for the market to crash. So lock your silver, monogram your soul, and pray the doorbell never rings after midnight.
IMDb —
1929
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