The Passing of the Third Floor Back

Christ comes as a thief in the night to sort out “The Big City” and its indwellers “of little faith”, a masterpiece from the author of Three Men in a Boat (dir. Ken Annakin), masterfully directed for Gaumont-British, as Frank S. Nugent observed in the New York Times (“a thoughtful, engrossing, delicately played picture”).

Halliwell’s Film Guide finds “a competent version of a famous, sentimental, dated play,” and cites Variety (“drawing power of the book, the play, the picturization and the star [Conrad Veidt] should, on form, be invincible”), also Graham Greene’s opinion that Jerome K. Jerome had been bettered.