Welcome to Over50sForum! The site for people over 50 to chat, make friends, discuss, share, and generally be part of something that's fun and friendly :)
The husband assumes that the woman seated next to him is complaining whereas she is simply making polite conversation. However we can see the wife holding forth in the background. Perhaps the husband feels that his comment was needed.
Commissionaires used to be considered to be a necessary adjunct to a cinema. I don’t know when they were no longer needed. The growing number of television sets no doubt is responsible. I think they were usually retired sergeant majors or Chief Petty Officers.
We know it for a fact, though ‘they’ couldn’t – the war was coming.
So much is clear. But who is speaking and what precisely is the point of this particular joke? Is it the passive man in the armchair or the butch woman with her back to the fire place? My guess he is speaking and telling her that Hitler is not a person to be ‘hailed’. I also think that the point is that even former admirers are coming to the reluctant conclusion that he has to be opposed and only war will remove him.
His plus fours signal his retirement. His slender son’s lament makes us wonder what it is that makes him feel so despondent. There’s the forthcoming war, obviously. Otherwise it doesn’t look that bleak for him.