De familie van mijn vrouw

Summary

Lively comedy around a baby and the mother-in-law from hell, based on the play 'Een huis vol herrie' ('A house full of strife'), by A. Duprez and A. Milo Bennet.

Jaap Speyer was born in Amsterdam in 1891. He left for Germany at a young age to study film. At 26, he directed the first of many films. Speyer returned to the Netherlands when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and made a number of comedies, among which Malle gevallen, De familie van mijn vrouw and De Jantjes which went on to become one of the most popular films of the time. De familie van mijn vrouw is a comedy of errors centred around a piano and the baby of a servant girl whose existence is unknown to all. The other protagonists are a nagging woman, her put-upon husband and their two daughters, one with ambitions to become a film star and the other happily married to a writer who loathes his mother-in-law.

Speyer's third Dutch feature film was greeted less enthusiastically than his earlier efforts but has some historically interesting scenes featuring such great (music hall) stars of the day as Johan Kaart Jr. and Sylvain Poons.