Home and Away

Dismissed by the late David Shipman as "another clinker from the same bunker as 'Where There's a Will'" and scarier than most of Vernon Sewell's horror films. It all feels as if it happened about a million years ago.

Technically it's a comedy, but as most previous reviewers have commented it actually takes a grim view indeed of working class life in a row of terraced houses in the fifties as the cast squabble over a pools win.

Thora Hird is on hand to create the same menace she later brought to 'A Kind of Loving', while the cast also includes an unrecognisable teenaged Kate O'Mara (billed as 'Merrie Carroll') in a gymslip and the only postwar film appearance of former silent comedian Leslie Henson in a high collar.

While with the two leads this resembles The Huggets, it is altogether more ambitious, accomplished and entertaining than any of the Huggets series. It has two sub-plots which are quite interesting but the real heart of it is the ensemble playing of a cast of prime mature comic character actors including Kathleen Harrison, Charles Victor, Thora Hird and Leslie Henson, with Jack Warner absent from the central scene. Films derived from plays have the advantage of being honed over a long period in front of a theatre audience, and it was not difficult to guess that this too had been a play. Each character particularly in the three couples is a very clearly drawn and recognisable type, quite elaborately and amusingly so with the fussy hen-pecked"gess"-addicted Charles Victor (Warner and Victor are workmates at the local gasworks - places, now all gone, which turned coal into domestic gas and once dominated their localities with their smell, soot, gloom and huge looming structures).

The characters, dialogue, situation and locations ring entirely true for a working class family in the 1930's-40s. Whether this amuses later generations is another matter but it is quite good material, expertly played, directed and edited.

When Bernard Fox wins a tidy sum on the football pools, his family and friends -- parents Jack Warner and Kathleen Harrison, sisters Lana Morris and Kate O'Meara, neighbors Charles Victor and Thora Hird -- are ready to celebrate. Nothing, however, is ever simple when it comes to money.

It's a class-conscious and misogynistic comedy as the women wrangle over money and snipe at each other, particularly Margaret St. Barbe West as Miss Harrison's parvenu and money-hungry sister, and Valerie White as the sleazy mother of Fox' partner in the ticket. Warner and Harrison are fine in their sweet spots as a married couple; they had co-starred in four or five movies in the "Hugget Family" series. Clearly this movie was cast to take advantage of their star pairing.

I found it more harrowing than funny, with an assortment of unlikable women slanging each other. It shows its origins on the stage very clearly, with almost all of it taking place on one set, with a few scenes shot outdoors near the end.

Jack Warner and Kathleen Harrison played the Huggets in a series of Rank forties films and also a BBC radio series which i remember used to start at around 2pm on the BBC Home Programme right after The Billy Cotton band show.So although they are not called The Huggets in this film thats what they are.Warner always called his wife ma and Harrison used to call Warner Dad.They were good stolid citizens and presumably were meant to represent how most working class families behaved.The fact is that with both Warner and Harrison both in their late fifties at the time of this film they were more likely to be Grandma and Grandpa.All anyone in this film seems to do is squabble and quite frankly by the end it becomes extremely tedious.

This is a well observed and tightly scripted piece. Yes it probably is more suited to stage than film but this is beautifully performed and a masterclass in comic timing. One reviewer here felt it necessary to describe it as misogynistic. The women here don't need defending from today's woke, revisionist perspective thank you very much. They are the ones in charge.

It is a comedy of manners, a social document illustrating class and gender rolls of its time and it shouldn't be dismissed or devalued because things are different today.