A career in law for restless junior barrister Tony Stevens (Michael Craig) has so far revolved around cases concerning sewage pollution and he's longing for something even slightly more salacious. His mood isn't improved upon learning that he is to share his chambers with a new female colleague, particularly as the idealistic Frances Pilbright (Mary Peach) comes from a prestigious legal family and is immediately offered interesting briefs.
Her first case centres on a middle-aged, working class - and, it seems, easily confused - woman named Gladys Pudney (Brenda da Banzie) who claims to have been married during the war before a bomb explosion gave her instant amnesia and she forgot all about her clownish, crooked husband Sidney (Ron Moody). Now recovered, Gladys has tracked him down, but he claims not to know her, perhaps due to the presence of a glamorous if somewhat sozzled girlfriend (Liz Fraser).
With so few offers of his own, Tony cons his caddish solicitor friend Hubert (John Standing) to give him the job of Sidney's defense counsel, and thereby places himself in direct opposition to Frances' efforts to prosecute. Their ensuing battle of wits before Mr Justice Haddon (James Robertson Justice) is further fraught by the growing attraction between them, and eventually upended altogether when it is emerges that Gladys isn't all that she appears...
This Rank comedy from Ralph Thomas and Betty Box was based on a play and adapted by actor Nicholas Phipps, who also appears (and would go on to write 1963's Doctor in Distress).
Set largely in a courtroom, A Pair of Briefs clearly betrays its stage-bound origins and though there is the occasional effort to expand, such scenes are unnecessary as enough energy is sustained through the performances.
Most particular of these is the ever-excellent James Robertson Justice, once again playing the abrasive intellectual who wearily tolerates and upbraids all who dare to test his patience and manages to anchor a story which might otherwise seem a little on the dull side.
Michael Craig is another plus, one of the most reliable of Britain's leading men of the period, though quite neglected today, while Mary Peach shines (despite being seemingly dubbed), especially in a late scene when her character becomes tearfully defiant in the face of what she considers to be the dry callousness of courtroom detachment. The following year, Peach would make it to Hollywood and appear alongside Rock Hudson and Rod Taylor in the flop aviation drama A Gathering of Eagles before turning her focus to British television. A pre-Oliver! Ron Moody deserves special mention too as Sidney Pudney, a disreputable and somewhat tedious man who he makes somehow likable, while Brenda De Banzie eschews the mature glamour of her other roles in favour of a northern, down-at-heel housewife.
Despite its saucy title, there is no sexual frolicking of the Carry On kind, or even slapstick, but neither is it as snotty as the Boulting Brothers' Brothers In Law. Instead, A Pair of Briefs is one of those forgotten old comedies that only seem to pop up in Britain on a weekday mid-afternoon on Channel 4: slight and maybe unmemorable, but amiably amusing with a familiar and capable cast, and certainly worth a watch for fans of inoffensive British films of the era.
