The Huggetts Abroad

The title of the last gasp of the Huggett series - Gainsborough Pictures itself soon followed later the same year - lead me to expect comic frolics abroad like 'Carry On Abroad', but it turns out to be a fairly rugged adventure film, albeit constructed around the Huggett family, with actual desert footage directed by editor Alan Osbiston surprisingly effectively integrated with studio-shot scenes of the Huggetts themselves. (Did emigrants to South Africa really get there in the late forties by trekking across the Sahara?)

Esma Cannon, who was murdered in the original 'Holiday Camp', surprisingly pops up briefly in a completely different role in this film as Petula Clark's scoutmistress.

The third film concerning the Huggett family has them in all kinds of problems. Jack Warner has lost his job and his son-in-law can't get passage for his wife Dinah Sheridan and himself to South Africa where a job awaits. So the whole Huggett clan, Warner, Kathleen Harrison, Hanley and Sheridan and the two other daughters Susan Shaw and Petula Clark decide to move bag and baggage to South Africa.

Here's what I don't get. For some reason they decide that it might be cheaper and faster to go overland from Algiers to Johannesburg and that's over 4000 miles through some nasty country, not all of it a colony of the United Kingdom. It seems so preposterous it's the reason I can't give The Huggetts Abroad a higher rating.

They also get some assistance from Hugh McDermott who has his own reasons for wanting to get out of Great Britain quickly and quietly.

With these British city folk in the Sahara desert The Huggetts Abroad is far more serious than the two previous Huggett films. If it weren't for the black and white I'd swear I was watching scenes from Legend Of The Lost.

Best part of the film is Petula Clark's singing. Before she became an international pop star in the 60s with Downtown she was a Deanna Durbin/Judy Garland like child star in the UK. Voice like Garland's a little Miss Fixit personality like Durbin's. But very pleasing to listen to.

Huggett Family fans of which there are many should like this one despite the impracticality of the premise.

Cracking,lightning right cross from 'Dixon of Dock Green' Jack Warner. See, violence! Oooh. The things you miss when you're far from Blighty! Jack's character missed his local. I sympathise + I miss pub Sunday roast lunches. Sufficient tension. A bit of innocent romance. Bit of sculduggery. Some répugnant people to hiss at. And you're sure it's going to end happily ever after. But is it? Well, you'll just have to watch, won't you!

OMG, review rejected for being too short! They want a bloody 600 word (well, character) essay. Yeah, if i'm being paid, but this is done out of the kindness of my heart in support of Talking Pictures TV, as I watch the followup Jack Warner/ Jimmy Hanley duo 1949 fillum,'The Blue Lamp', for which I will NOT bother to review because I'd like to watch it, thank you very much.

There you have it, my last review. Not that it will be published.

The decision to take the Huggetts out of their natural habitat and dump them in the African desert was misguided enough to spell disaster for the series. The usually light-hearted nature of the films is also abandoned for this tale of diamond smuggling in which Pa Huggett and his prospective son-in-law undertake an arduous trek across the desert when supplies run short. It's watchable enough, but lacks the spirit of the other movies in the series.

If you remember the Huggets then probably this film is for you. It follows the family attempting to escape from austerity England to South Africa, and getting caught up in some diamond smuggling along the way.

The plot is paper thin (so much so that it almost disappears at one point), and the direction moves in fits and starts, but if you're feeling nostalgic for the days when we believed in the stereotypes for foreigners because we had no experience to teach us better, then you'll like this. Interestingly enough, the only out and out baddie in the film is another Englishman - even the Canadian diamond smuggler is a lovable rogue.

The film is made palatable for me, however, by Jack Warner, who despite playing more or less the same character as his subsequent Dixon of Dock Green (and The Blue Lamp) police sergeant, exudes an irresistible avuncular warmth, and Pet Clark, whose bubbly performance helps raise the rest of the family out of the mire that an uninspired screenplay tries to put them. She also gets to sing, though you'd never believe this little girl is the same as she who sang Downtown.