Returning to the West End, Gielgud starred in J. B.Priestley's "The Good Companions", adapted for the stage by the author and Edward Knoblock. The production ran from May 1931 for 331 performances, and Gielgud described it as his first real taste of commercial success. He played Inigo Jollifant, a young schoolmaster who abandons teaching to join a travelling theatre troupe. This crowd-pleaser drew disapproval from the more austere reviewers, who felt Gielgud should be doing something more demanding, but he found playing a conventional juvenile lead had challenges of its own and helped him improve his technique. During the run of the play he made another film, "Insult" (1932), a melodrama about the French Foreign Legion, and he starred in a cinema version of "The Good Companions" in 1933, with Jessie Matthews. A letter to a friend reveals Gielgud's view of film acting: "There is talk of my doing Inigo in the film of "The Good Companions", which appals my soul but appeals to my pocket." In his first volume of memoirs, published in 1939, Gielgud devoted two pages to describing the things about filming that he detested. Unlike his contemporaries Richardson and Laurence Olivier, he made few films until after the Second World War, and did not establish himself as a prominent film actor until many years after that. As he put it in 1994, "I was stupid enough to toss my head and stick to the stage while watching Larry and Ralph sign lucrative Korda contracts."