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Reviews66
dsewizzrd-1's rating
This damaged film was probably only recovered because it has a young Audrey Hepburn, way down the credits list. There are quite a few missing frames after 00:35.
The film itself, adapted from a wordy radio play, is a domestic farce-drama with two middle class couples living in a supposedly crowded but seemingly spacious house in the suburbs during the postwar housing shortage. No doubt on the wireless - for which it was originally written - it could have sounded suitably claustrophobic and drab. However the cinema was about fantasy, and the producers decided to set in the film in what would have been considered at the time fabulous middle class luxury. No attempt was made to adapt it for that change.
They look for a nanny - even though one of the women has no job and could presumably look after two children - and this and an absolute rotter in an Austin Atlantic lead to a dreadful situation. Product placement - Lux soap flakes.
Charlie Drake, the small, red haired, fat trying comedian, is Sands, a travel agent in this film written and directed by John Paddy Carstairs.
Carstairs made some great films for Norman Wisdom, but he struggled a lot to make anything of the strictly middle school comic (as in Adam Sandler) Charlie Drake.
Sands is sent to the middle east to establish a resort in an area contested by two local tribal leaders, one with a secret oil contract, after another travel agent is assasinated.
There are long scenes of big healthy girls in the harem, the boys in year 7 would have liked that. Product placement - Cinzano.
Alastair Sim, Diana Dors, Stanley Holloway, Dennis Price, George Cole and Sidney James in this Girl's Own story about a drippy young woman in the midlands chosen in a beauty pageant in Westbourne (Blackpool) to advertise soap.
All the actors play their respective characters, Diana Dors as a bad girl in the pageant, Stanley Holloway as the avuncular father, Dennis Price as a philandering film star, George Cole as a ingenuous working class piker, and Sidney James as a dodgy geezer running a strip show.
But it doesn't really save the contrived and well worn plot.