The Franchise Affair

Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray (real life husband and wife for 60 years!) star in "The Franchise Affair" from 1951.

This film is based on a novel by Josephine Tey, which I read years ago and remember very well. The movie is a good adaptation.

The first scene shows a dishelved, bruised young woman, Betty Kane (Ann Stephens) who runs to her home in the dark after exiting a bus.

Denison plays Robert Blair, a British solicitor who is approached by Marion Sharpe, who lives with her mother (Marjorie Fielding) in a large house called The Franchise. The young woman is question is accusing Marion and her mother of holding her prisoner for several weeks and forcing her to work for them.

Betty had been visiting a relative and seems to have overstayed, but when her mother contacts the relative, Betty had already left. So where was she? And with whom?

Marion is fighting to remain calm, but it's terrifying. Betty knows all kinds of details about the grounds that she could not have seen from a bus, for instance, and describes the room where she was kept in perfect detail.

Though Blair doesn't take criminal cases, he's sympathetic toward the womens' plight and agrees to help. The women have to handle hate mail, hate phone calls, and rocks through their windows. Blair asks the local garage man for help, and he agrees to stay in the house.

Meanwhile, Blair is desperate to get some evidence against Betty Kane. He believes the Sharpes.

Very good movie with Kenneth More in a smaller role as the garage mechanic.

Very entertaining.

I would not be put off from watching this very enjoyable movie by some of the opinions posted here. THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR is a movie you should seek out because it is, simply, very well made.

The 1951 film was based on the Josephine Tey novel - recently voted by the Crime Writer's Association as one of the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time - and her novel was in turn based on a true 18th century case, that of Elizabeth Canning. Canning was a woman who accused two other women of kidnapping her and forcing her to become a prostitute. As the evidence against them grows a lawyer very reluctantly agrees to take on their case.

The film was made in moody black and white, nicely photographed by Gunther Krampf, a cameraman who began his career shooting beautiful silent films in Germany before emigrating to Britain in the late 1930s. His work has graced many a film. The story was updated by author Tey to the present time and the movie presents pleasant views of English village life in the 1940s. The script is extremely well-written. True, it contains a good deal of dialog, literate dialog I might add, but I believe this enhances the story-telling in the picture rather than takes away from it.

The acting is, as always with films made in the golden years of British film making, top-notch. I was more than a little amused by the criticism of one writer on this site who disparaged Mr Denison's acting and of another who called the acting "stilted". I suppose if one is accustomed to the hilarious, idiotically over-the-top acting style of today it is hard to adjust to genuinely fine acting. Again, do not be put off by comments like this: the acting is first-rate all down the line. Look for future British film stars in small roles here and there, and relish the delightfully dotty performance of the great Athene Seyler as the lawyer's mother. Such witty and well-judged performances like those are always worth a look.

THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR is very highly recommended.

The film sticks closely to the book, which is a plus. It was made soon after the war, and some of the events recall what people had been through - being demonised and having mobs graffiti your premises and throw rocks through your window, and worse.

The acting is fine, especially from old Mrs Sharp. The makers avoided the temptation to have the other characters comment on her saltiness - she just comes out with her rather acid quips. She is funny, and so is Michael Deniston as Robert Blair, the solicitor.

I agree with the commenter who regretted the static nature of the filming - yes, it is stagey. Characters don't move much, and there are few close-ups or reaction shots.

The working-class characters are more prominent in the book, but they are well-played by such as Kenneth More and Patrick Troughton.

40s films gained by the glamour and style of women's clothes and hairdos. What went so wrong in the 50s!?!? Betty Kane is supposed to look frumpy in her school clothes, but poor Dulcie Gray is saddled with middle-aged clothes and a hair-don't.

The Franchise affair is set in 50s England when people doffed their caps, respect was given its due and everything was oh so proper. This film stars the real life married couple Dennison and Gray and you can see by their interplay that they love each other. Ann Stephens plays Betty Kane which must be the highlight of her brief career. Athene Seyler as Dennisons Aunt is as always a delight and we have a future Doctor Who as well as Tremayne from the Champions doing very professional work.Kenny More in an early part oozes his considerable charm and the film works on a quaint level. The stilted acting is a product of English film in the fifties and there is enough intrigue to keep everyone happy. All in all a lovely little picture.

A reasonably faithful adaptation of Josephine Tey's 1948 novel based on an actual case of alleged kidnapping nearly two hundred years earlier; but also all too common unfortunately in the twenty-first century.

It begins rather like 'Kiss Me Deadly' with a flimsily dressed young woman thumbing a lift at night, while the mob violence unleashed against the two 'outsiders' recalls 'Le Corbeau'. But for the most part it's content to amble along without much sense of urgency as you scratch your head pondering over the 'why' rather than the 'what'?