The Happy Family

The Festival of Britain is near opening. Naunton Wayne is deputed to go talk to Stanley Holloway and Kathleen Harrison. They operate a little shop on a freehold right next to the site. It turns out a draftsman made a teeny tiny error on the blueprints, and their house must be destroyed and they must move. An Englishman's home being his castle, they say no.

This Muriel Box comedy has a definite PASSPORT TO PIMLICO feel to it, with psychic sister-in-law Dandy Nichols, communist prospective son-in-law John Stratton, and similar odd appurtenances fighting the cautious bureaucrats they oppose. The cast is delightful in this celebration of the British love of eccentricity.

A wonderful look at life in London during the early 1950's. Stanley Holloway and Kathleen Harrison play Mr and Mrs Lord, who run a small corner shop in the middle of a bombed out street. When the Government decide to build an exhibition site, to celebrate the Festival of Britain, the building work is well advanced, until somebody sees that the Lords shop is right the middle of where the main road, and the pedestrian underpass should be. The Lords try to contact their local MP, the mayor, and anybody else who can help them, finally having to barricade themselves along with the other family members inside the shop, until somebody can come up with a solution. Holloway and Harrison are superb as usual, as is a young George Cole, long before his days as Arthur Daley, also giving good support is Dandy Nichols Eileen Moore, and Naunton Wayne as the Government Minister, who has to come up a solution to keep everybody happy.

This feels awfully like an Ealing film.Maybe because the plot is similar to Passport To Pimlico and some of the actors in that film appear in this.Probably this is because the ability to click a snook at authority was very popular at the time.The war may have been over for 6 years but it didn't feel like it.We still had rationing.Interesting to see the way the South Bank looked in the aftermath of the war.Interesting also to see Dandy Nicholls some 15 years before she would find fame as Mrs Alf Garnett in"Till Death Us Do Part".Also of course George Cole who was forging a reasonable film career till he found fame in Minder.Finally all one can say about Kathleen Harrison is that she was a national treasure.

Was waiting for a flash of the Stanley Holloway from My Fair Lady to no avail. It wasn't funny nor entertaining. Perhaps in it's day it was, but....