The Great Garrick is a 1937 American historical comedy film directed by James Whale and starring Brian Aherne, Olivia de Havilland, and Edward Everett Horton.

The film also features Lionel Atwill, Luis Alberni, Melville Cooper, and future star Lana Turner,[1] who has a bit part.

Based on the play Ladies and Gentlemen by Ernest Vajda,[2] the film is about the famous eighteenth-century British actor David Garrick, who travels to France for a guest appearance at the Comédie Française.

[3] In London in 1750, renowned English actor David Garrick announces onstage that he has been invited to Paris to work with the prestigious Comédie-Française.

The outraged French actors, led by their president, Picard, take over the inn where he will be staying, and Beaumarchais devises a plot to humiliate Garrick publicly.

At the inn, Picard tries to rally his cast, but meets with temperament and histrionics on every side, particularly from Basset, whose insistence on playing a madman is quite maddening.

They plan to discomfort the Englishman with a near miss from a falling trunk; a seemingly fatal duel with swords; a shootout between a husband and his wife's lover; Basset's mad waiter; and finally, an attack from a violent blacksmith.

Garrick and Tubby arrive at the inn, and the "blacksmith," drunk and lacking a script, mistakes his cue and smashes one of the carriage wheels.

Uncredited actors include Harry Davenport as the Innkeeper of Turk's Head and Fritz Leiber Jr., later well known as an author, as Fortinbras in the Hamlet play.

The film was made by James Whale for Warner Brothers shortly after the troubled production of The Road Back which had met with controversy and opposition from the Nazi government, and strained his relationship with his bosses at Universal Pictures where he had worked for the past six years.

[6] Variety called it: ... a production of superlative workmanship fabricated from old prints of the period, and acting by a fine cast in the flamboyant manner demanded by the script...not without some very amusing angles.

[8] In 2006, Dennis Schwartz wrote that this "neglected period farce deserves more attention and love; it's one of Whale's most joyous films and shows he can make great comedies outside of the horror genre...