Eine verrückte Familie

The overall plot of this film is very basic and not very interesting. It's a shame that with the great cast, more couldn't be done to write a better script. The entire movie probably could be shortened down to half an hour and still be boring. If your curious give it a watch but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it.

Associated British made good war films but awful comedies till they came up with the Carry Ons.If it were not for the fact that this film was made in colour you would reckon this to be a quota quickie.Just one main set,photographing this from centre stage,perfunctory editing and cacophonic music.This film was totally unfunny and a total waste of the talent involved.

An absolutely awful piece of canned theatre - with a stupid Hammond organ score - based on a 1948 farce by Noel Langley called 'Little Lambs Eat Ivy' popular enough to be deemed worthy of Technicolor.

It's good to see the glamorous Heather Thatcher as the hub of all this self-consciously 'screwball' activity, but hard to believe that director Henry Cass had only two years earlier made the sublime 'Last Holiday' (and harder still to believe he later made horror films followed by plays & films for Moral Rearmament)!

Adapted from a radio play – not very much ! – this entirely stage set domestic drama has the actors doing monologues and sotto voce to the non – existent audience.

It follows the domestic travails of a family, including the birth of a child at their house, the woman the wife of a particularly annoying Richard Attenborough, and a "dreadful situation" between a beatnik fiancée and his girlfriend's younger sister and her callow witless boyfriend.

There are also a couple of love intrigues and an old man with an amazingly dull "radio" voice. Sidney James has a brief cameo as a cabby.

"Father's Doing Fine" Review

March 23, 2012

Lady Buckering, who has four daughters, is in bad financial straits but nonetheless lives very well – there's a butler, all the women have wonderful clothes, there's a private nurse and plenty of liquor handy. One of her daughters is about to have a baby (the father is the Attenborough character, Dougall), one is married to a pseudo-intellectual, one is rebounding from a love affair gone bad and the youngest daughter is an insufferable drama queen. Attenborough plays the stereotypically nervous father-to-be with gusto.

"Father's Doing Fine" is based on the play "Little Lambs Eat Ivy." I simply do not understand the significance of the title (yes, I know the song Mairzy Doats). The movie's title seems off kilter as well since it is the mother, Lady Buckering, around whom all the frenetic doings occur. Indeed, Lady Buckering (the delightful Heather Thatcher) has all the best lines in this farce.

For me, farce is always better as a stage production than as a movie. This movie is silly but Thatcher's and Attenborough's performances make it fun to watch.