Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary

Celebrated American wartime pilot "Vining" (Bonar Colleano) returns to the UK with his new wife "Gillian" (Diana Decker) to be met by his old chum "Hank" (Sidney James). On the drive to their lodgings his pal regales the new wife with tales of her husband's ex-girlfriend "Candy" (Diana Dors). Unfortunately, the media report his arrival with new wife "Candy" by mistake and when the latter woman discovers this she heads to his home where a mischievous confrontation ensues - who is married to whom? It's only eighty minutes long but it seems much longer. The joke wears thin quickly and the performances from Colleano, the annoying James and a rather irritating contribution for the lawyer "Betterton" (David Tomlinson) stretch this out in an increasingly cringe-making fashion. The jaunty score tries hard to compensate for the predictable storyline and rotten dialogue and I found it quite heavy going.

Commander Vining (Bonar Colleano) is an American officer who was stationed in Britain during the war. He's now returning to the country with his brand new wife on a new assignment. As they are about to celebrate their first night as husband and wife, a snag occurs....the Commander's ex-wife (Diana Dors) arrives and announces that they are STILL married! Is this true? And, if so, what about his honeymoon? And, what if his new wife finds out about it?

This film suffers from one problem...it's actually a problem with an easy solution. All he needed to do was sit down with the first and second wife and talk about it rationally. But instead, the Commander and his his lawyer (David Tomlinson) act like goofballs and the film is jampacked full of slapstick and silliness. To a point, this was funny...but also quite contrived. Overall, very watchable but far from a great film.



By the way, Colleano specialized in playing Americans in British films...particularly brash ones. It seems he moved to the UK and was in high demand due to his genuine American accent. Sadly, he died at 34 after being involved in a traffic accident.

Commander Bonar Colleano and his bride, Diana Decker, have just been married. He has been reassigned to London, so they plan to honeymoon there. When it hits the newspaper, up pops Diana Does; she's his first wife and, because he was divorced in California, they're still actually married. She turns up at the hotel, which makes the marriage celebration awkward. Afraid to tell Miss Decker about the situation, Colleano stashes Miss Does in the hotel suite's guest bedroom, and calls in his British lawyer, fuddy-duddy David Tomlinson.

It's a brittle, sexless sex comedy, but all hands show themselves excellent farceurs in Maurice Elvey's adaptation of a stage play by Vivian Tidmarsh. Elvey concentrates more on cuts to keep this moving among the three or four sets that make up the venue.

One of the peculiarities of this production is that despite all the American characters, few of them are played by Americans. Sid James plays Colleano's aide, and it's peculiar to see the man with the dirtiest laugh in all of show business playing a woman-hater. Lou Jacobi has a small role in his screen debut. Even if you don't recognize his form before he put on a lot of weight, you can't mistake his voice.

Rarely seen (though that's soon to change we're told thanks to a BFI DVD release in June) Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? is a fun, breezy comedy which sees some cracking performances delivered with a palpable energy.

Admittedly seen 50 plus years on what was no doubt a very funny entertainment for its week (this was my parents childhood time when, as they delight in telling me, only one or two people on the street had a TV and they went to the cinema every week) but today it does seem slight. There's little to the story with any sense of reality going out the window early on. Not that you don't expect a farce to be ridiculous, that's the point, but when done really well they can tread the fine line between the credible and the ridiculous. I think this one goes past it by the end. It says something that probably 10-20 minutes before the end i was starting to think "this is going on a bit" - when it's only an 80 minute film.

Okay, so it's no classic but there's lots to enjoy here. Although David Tomlinson (probably best known to modern audiences as the father in Mary Poppins and for other Disney roles in films like Bedknobs & Broomsticks and The Love Bug) and Diana Dors get top billing the film belongs to the frantic antics (and shameless mugging) of Bonar Colleano. He's a hoot as the American serviceman who finds he may inadvertently be a bigamist and has to juggle both wives in adjacent rooms of a hotel suite. I didn't know Colleano before this movie but as he died in a car accident at the early age of 34 he was perhaps cut off too early to have made the lasting impression on film that his performance here makes me think he could have.

Diana Dors is dynamite on screen and the comparisons to Marilyn stand up. The camera loves her and she knows how to use it, but while many would be distracted by the image if you pay attention you can really see a talented performer beyond it. I know a lot of people that peg Marilyn as just a pretty face (and dynamite body of course) but you watch her in films like Seven Year Itch, Don't Bother To Knock (a fascinating performance) etc and you see a genuinely talented performer. I haven't seen enough Dors to qualify it but the way she uses her persona and profile here suggest more than just the image she's remembered for.

Tomlinson plays the befuddled, bumbling British gentleman with aplomb as usual - though you never really believe the relationship angle to his storyline. Sid James takes some getting used to as an American serviceman for those of us used to his Carrying On but he is great and very funny, especially in his scenes with the delightful Audrey Freeman.

Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? may not stand up as a classic but it doesn't need to. It does stand up as a fun, playful little story with a good cast giving it their all. Well worth a watch.

Based on a 1944 West End stage success with Ralph Lynn, this is a classic bedroom farce for those who like them that way -- its theatrical origins acknowledged in the credits and clearly apparent when most of the action takes place with characters popping in and out of a single-room set -- enlivened by a sex-pot performance by Diana Dors as blackmailing first wife Candy. The original play was apparently minus the high American quotient in the plot here: the impression given is that the production company had their main eye on selling into the US market, although the precedents for this sort of attempt had not been historically favourable...

There are plenty of easy laughs to be had out of a generally lively script, although the characters are all standard 'types'; ironically, it is sex symbol Dors who presents perhaps the only character who is allowed to develop any depth, as we discover that Candy isn't quite the shallow, man-mad harpy she initially appears to be. (I have to admit that in today's permissive climate, it took me some while to realise that it wasn't just the presence of this uninvited guest but the implications, however technical, for his marital status that had so signally deflated Vining's enthusiasm for his honeymoon...)

Sid James plays the Commander's 'dumb buddy' with enthusiasm, although his accent does wander a little between American, South African and Cockney. David Tomlinson, who was a well-known stage actor at the time (and married to Audrey Freeman, who here plays the pert maid Lucy), produces a classic 'worm that turns' performance as the hapless Frank Betterton; Bonar Colleano is flashy and lively in the Ralph Lynn role of the embarrassed husband on his second honeymoon. (I'm impressed by his prowess at head-stands!)

Production quality seems generally good, although there is one obvious use of background projection for a single scene near the start; puzzlingly, since all the surrounding airport shots appear to be genuine. The print we saw had a soundtrack glitch in the final minute or so of dialogue.

I felt that the final plot twist was a complication too far in a story that appeared to have neatly sorted itself out, but doubtless that was the intention. And while I admit to laughing a good deal as the play (oops-- film) went on, it was not especially memorable fare; well worth what I paid for it (i.e. nothing, as this was a BFI Members' free screening!) but with no pretensions to greatness.

Pure farce isn't really my line, I'm afraid, but if you're a fan of Dors -- or any of the other performers -- the film is worth seeing, though don't expect too much. It isn't sophisticated entertainment, and doesn't pretend to be. Clever, cardboard, and slightly titillating (Diana Decker's nightdress is quite something; Diana Dors' twin-torpedo torso is something else!)