With the arrival of talkies, Brunel's career ground to a halt and he was absent from the screen for several years before returning in the mid-1930s with a flurry of quota quickie productions, most of which are now considered lost.

On leaving school he worked for a time as a local journalist in Brighton before taking employment in London in the bioscope show distribution division of music hall chain Moss Empires.

Brunel's most highly admired production of this period is 1924's Crossing the Great Sagrada, a spoof of the hugely popular travelogue genre of the time, in which its conventions are laid bare as the absurdities they are.

This resulted in five films between 1926 and 1929, all of which were high profile, big-budget productions with star names, and were designed as serious prestige vehicles with none of the opportunities for the humour and facetiousness of most of Brunel's earlier work.

[7] In 1928 there followed two films which reunited Brunel with Novello as his leading actor: the first screen adaptation of Margaret Kennedy's best-selling novel The Constant Nymph and a version of the Noël Coward play The Vortex.

It is not exactly clear why Brunel in particular should have found his career so comprehensively derailed at this time, although it is suggested that his pursuance of a legal claim against Gainsborough for alleged non-payment of fees may well have tarnished his reputation in the film industry by making him appear a potential trouble-maker.

Brunel's last three feature films, The Rebel Son (1938); The Lion Has Wings (1939), a three-way directorial venture with Michael Powell and Brian Desmond Hurst; and The Girl Who Forgot (1940), were more visible productions which do survive.

In an assessment of Brunel's significance in British cinema history, Geoff Brown concludes: "...(his) career was clearly not what it might have been, and the apparent absence of surviving copies of many of his talkies makes a thorough re-evaluation of his work difficult.

But the burlesque comedies alone give him a distinctive place in British cinema history as a satirical jester, and a key player in the film industry's uneasy war between art and commerce.