A Man's Affair

Hamish Menzies is holidaying at Ramsgate, enjoying the funfair with his pal when he runs into Diana Decker -- quite literally, they're in bumper cars -- and they fall into real but still cool love. He tells her he is a student. That's a lie. He's a coal miner. He knows very well that sensible English girls don't want to marry someone in that dead-end situation.

The leads are pleasant, but in main it's a "will they or won't they?" romantic comedy. Even so,there are a few nice points. Most obvious is the issue of class mobility. It's not a matter of the brutish and low-born Heathcliff yearning for the high-born Catherine. Aspiration and fear divide a seemingly infinite number of classes, yawning chasms unnoticed by anyone not living on their divides. By the end of the next decade it would become a standard of British stage and film, and in another ten years, fit for Monty Python's burlesque.

The other point worth noting is the recording of Ramsgate in this period. Blackpool has been shown on film many times, if only in versions of HINDLE WAKES, but the Ramsgate setting is far less usual. They make this worth watching.