Edmund Gwenn is a quiet and modest businessman married to Katie Price, and an almost-engaged daughter in Victoria Hopper. He's also got some cadging in-laws living with him, Cedric Hardwicke and his wife Ethel Coleridge. One evening Harwicke hits Gwenn up for a substantial sum of money, claiming it is a business opportunity. So Gwenn tells him that his real business is forgery. Suddenly everything changes. Hardwicke may be a leech, but he's not going to have anything to do with crooks. And Miss Hopper's young man is likewise aghast and on the point of calling off the understanding. After all, Gwenn has admitted he's a crook. Or is he joking?
It's based on a J. B. Priestley play, and only slightly opened up from the stage, but it's a distinguished cast for director Carol Reed, It's only his third movie in that seat, and he was already out of the quota quickies. Perhaps his quick rise was because he was the illegitimate son of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, one of six he had with a second family he kept in Putney. Reed had a middle-class upbringing, and when he said he wanted to go on the stage, his mother shipped him off to his elder brother's chicken farm in Massachusetts. He was soon back in England, acting with Dame Sybil Thorndike's company, and then on to a stage troupe started by Edgar Wallace to stage his works. He followed Wallace to British Lion. When Wallace died, he transferred to ATP (which became Ealing), as a dialogue director. And so began his career. He died in 1976 at the age of 69.
