The Jeeves Collection (Thank You, Jeeves / Step Lively, Jeeves)

Product Description Disc 1 Side A - Thank You, Jeeves: **Full Frame Version **"Thank You, P.G: The Life of P.G Wodehouse" **Restoration Comparison Disc 1 Side B - Step Lively, Jeeves!: **Full Frame Version **The World of Wodehouse **Restoration Comparison Amazon.com If manservants aren't what they used to be, the best of the lot live on in the character of Jeeves, created by the humorist P.G. Wodehouse and played to a fare-thee-well by Arthur Treacher in two firecracker films in this boxed set. Though the conceit of the household help bailing out clueless employers has been used in pop culture for decades (from Arthur to The Brady Bunch), it reached its upper-crust pinnacle in the Jeeves films, including Thank You, Jeeves! (1936) and Step Lively, Jeeves! (1937). David Niven rocketed to stardom in Thank You, Jeeves!, playing the befuddled Bertie Wooster--just this once, but inventing "David Niven" in the process: elegant yet befuddled, suave yet naive. The plot's cucumber-slice-thin, involving a mysterious heiress (with whom Bertie, naturally, is smitten), and a constables-and-robbers slapstick farcical pace. Its real appeal is the snapshot of a bygone era of England, where pencil-thin mustaches, and a well-delivered "veddy good, sir!" were signs that all was well in the realm. In Step Lively, Jeeves!, Treacher returns not as sidekick, but star in an unlikely romp that involves Jeeves' being drawn into a con in which he's told he's an heir to the fortune of Sir Francis Drake. (Interestingly, a version of this con actually happened throughout the 1930s in England and America, and its day was as confounding and ever-present as the internet-era's "Nigerian scams.") Treacher holds his own without Bertie, though the script takes liberties with the Wodehouse character--the Jeeves of the books would never get slurry-drunk--but the action is screwball comedy at its best, and supporting actors are all a delight. Each title on the two-sided disc includes a featurette on P.G. Wodehouse, which, viewed together, give a compelling vision of the man behind the rapier wit. His writing output was prodigious and resulted in some of Hollywood's most entertaining screwball comedies; the viewer will have a great desire both to read more of Wodehouse's works, and to see other films, especially the delightful Fred Astaire film A Damsel in Distress. --A.T. Hurley