Home and Away

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.

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.

Home and Away is directed by Vernon Sewell and Sewell co-writes the screenplay with Heather McIntyre and R.F. Delderfield. It stars Jack warner, Thora Hird, Kathleen Harrison, Lana Morris, Charles Victor and Valerie White. Music is by Robert Sharples and cimematography by Basil Emmott.

A working class British family's luck seems to have turned when the father hits the jackpot on the football pools...

How wonderfully quaint and of its time, this harks back to an era when all the family lived under one roof, where the patriarch's opinion held sway and any woman who was remotely flighty was looked down upon. This was before the lottery's of the world started to take a hold and dangled riches beyond compare to the lucky winners. Back here in the 1950s there was The Football Pools, a coupon you would fill out in the hope of toting up enough points from football match predictions of the week and snag the jackpot. Hope springs eternal...

George Knowles (Warner) thinks he has finally cracked it, and thus the celebrations begin - but then there's a twist and the film kicks on to something more darker in tone. It's the reactions of all involved that keeps this ever watchable, the humour derived from the catty barbs the women throw at each other, and then the male foibles also come to the fore. The message of money as poison is deftly played, as is the family values angle, and while it doesn't finish off with a bang, pic has a comforting feel that has made worth the time investment. 6.5/10

Pretty good show but it needs an irate old man calling people flaming mongrels.