Inn for Trouble

After twenty years of working for Leslie Phillips' brewery, a tied house has come up empty. By company tradition, managers with enough seniority get the house to run, and it's David Kossoff's turn. So he packs up the family and goes to deal with local coppers, local competitors and a community that has no taste for the national brew when a local baronet produces an excellent beer and gives it away even three months.

It's an attempt to transfer the TV success of THE LARKINS, an ITV show that ran from 1958 through 1964, to the big screen. As is usual with this sort of transfer, the main cast is put in a new situation, and it is hoped that the fans of the TV show will come out to see it on a big screen. Since I don't know the show, I found, for example, Peggy Mount as Kossoff's henpecking, never-listen-to-anyone wife more annoying than amusing, and stretching out a 30-minute episode to almost 90 can't have helped much. clearly, like other movies of its type -- I recall the 1960s BATMAN, MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E, and MCHALE'S NAVY theatrical releases, and they weren't very good. For this one, not only was there the issue of translation from one medium to another, but its moment has passed.