Glad Tidings!

Glad Tidings! Is a low budget curiosity based on a stage play by R F Delderfield.

It is efficiently directed by Wolf Rilla with art direction by John Stoll. He would later win an Oscar for Lawrence of Arabia.

The story is creaky. Tom Forester (Raymond Huntley) is a middle aged man who has been having a discreet affair with American Kay Stuart (Barbara Kelly.)

Now his children are older, he has told them that he plans to marry Kay. Only they not so overly keen on this.

Kay tries to win them over, especially the selfish daughters. One of them is having a affair with a married man. The other has fallen with a RAF corporal who does not have enough money to provide for her.

Forester also has issues as the air force has commandeered part of the golf club.

There really is not much to this post war middle class beige comedy drama. It is so undernourished that the comedy must have been rationed.

There's an academic paper in the films produced after the war by the late Victor Hanbury.

From 'Daughter of Darkness' (1948) to 'The Sleeping Tiger' (1954) he evidently had a penchant for commissioning heated melodramas with largely female casts in which bottled-up passions well up and collide with skeletons in the closet of postwar British life while the men tend rather gormlessly to be largely oblivious of the emotional heat reaching boiling point around them.

Raymond Huntley has problems. Not only has the Air Force commandeered the 13th green of his golf club, but his long-simmering relationship with American Barbara Kelly has reached the boiling point. While his children were young, they had maintained a discreet relationship. Now that they have grown up, the time has come for them to get married. However the children are still adamantly opposed to her.

Although all the performers do their best with their roles, this movie, based on a play by R.F. Delderfield has an essential problem: there's no real reason for the youngsters to object to Miss Kelly except for the demands of the plot. the result is that they are all at least slightly nasty, even as they are engaged in their own love affairs. One is carrying on with a married man, another has fallen for Corporal Ronald Howard, who doesn't earn enough money.... matters like that. Of course, it's all up to Miss Kelly to sort matters out, even as they protest at her interference.

It's Wolf Rilla's first movie as a director; he also wrote the screenplay, opening it up a bit from the play. He cannot, however, do much to deal with the rote issues and the stereotyped and unlikeable characters.

'Glad Tidings' is frankly a fairly lame attempt at middle class domestic humour in the early 1950's. It has a incredulous and unlikely storyline, where a young and pretty American women, played by Barbara Kelly, is 'dating,' the stuffy, pompous and middle aged Raymond Huntley, the chairman of the local and equally stuffy golf club. One has to suspend a sense of disbelief that Kelly would be even remotely interested in marrying a much older and staid character like Huntley; indeed throughout the film, there seems to be no sexual or romantic chemistry between the two ill matched pair! The other baffling feature of the film is that the arrival at the Huntley country home of a young American woman, seems to spark immediate antagonism from Huntley's daughters, for no other reason than she's an American. The incongruity of the storyline takes a turn for the worse when two worthy, but gormless members of the Air Force, Terence Alexander and Ronald Howard, arrive at the country home where they encounter the two daughters, who show more than just a passing interest in the two servicemen. However, the adolescent behaviour of these two dim witted individuals in endeavouring to woo the daughters is frankly cringeworthy! The cut glass accents and the tedious behaviour of Howard and Alexander had me reaching for the off switch. One of the many reasons why British audiences flocked to see American films was the poor standard of British B films. Had the director cast a more realistic male lead playing opposite Barbara Kelly, then the film would have at least some semblance of believability!

Originally, apparently this was a stage play, unfortunately not the same principals were cast in this film version. I think during the run of a successful play, the cast both individually and as a ensemble develop the characters and their performances for best effect. The supporting cast, the well knowns and not so well knowns are fine, Ronald Howard indeed was something of a star. The problem was the lack of believability and suitability of the two principals.

At the time of filming Raymond Huntley was 49, Barbara Kelly 29. Huntley seems old in manner for his years and plays his accustomed stuffy authority figure (usually senior solicitor, civil servant etc). There is no hint of his being interested in younger women, or reasons why they should be in him. He was not an actor who could make the situation believable - or amusing. Barbara Kelly as his wife plays a steam-rollering foil to his stuffiness, bursting his pomposity and narrow-mindedness in front of the children and their newly acquired RAF boyfriends. The film closes with laughter from all - which neither what had preceded it justified, nor the prospects for the mis-matched marriage.

*watched on "Talking Pictures" Freeview Channel 81 new (since Sept 2015) UK 24 hour old film only TV channel