Lady in Danger: A bit of a muddle, but charming

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, Lady in Danger is the kind of movie you put on when you want to feel like you’re sitting in a dusty velvet seat in 1934. If you love stiff-upper-lip comedies where everyone talks way too fast and gets offended by doors opening at the wrong time, you’ll have a ball. If you get annoyed by people not just explaining the plot to their partners to save us all forty minutes of trouble, you might want to skip it.

The premise is simple enough: Tom Walls has to hide a queen. He puts her in his flat. Then he puts her in his country house. The comedy is supposed to come from everyone thinking he’s having an affair, but mostly it just feels like everyone is very tired and needs a stiff drink.

Tom Walls has this specific way of looking exhausted that I actually really like. He’s not playing a hero; he’s playing a guy who just wants his tea and to not have a revolution happening in his living room. Yvonne Arnaud, as the Queen, spends half the movie acting like she’s never seen a piece of modern furniture before. It’s a bit much, honestly.

Some random notes from my pad:

• The pacing is all over the place. One minute they’re in a tense political standoff, the next they’re arguing about tea service.
• The dialogue is very "stage-y." You can almost hear the prompter behind the curtains.
• There is a moment in the second act where a door is opened and closed so many times it stopped being funny and started being a structural concern for the set.

It reminded me a little bit of the chaotic energy in Leave It to Me, though maybe a bit less refined. Not that any of these are exactly high art. They are just bits of fluff made to keep people busy on a rainy Tuesday.

I found myself wondering if anyone in the cast actually knew what the ending was supposed to be, or if they just made it up as they went along. The way they scramble around the country house feels very improvised in a "we ran out of budget for a real script" kind of way.

It’s not a masterpiece. It’s barely a movie, really. But for 80 minutes, it does the trick if you don't think too hard about the geopolitical implications of smuggling royalty in a suitcase. Or whatever the heck they were doing. I stopped counting the misunderstandings around the thirty-minute mark.

Just watch it for the hats. The fashion is truly something else. 🎩