Fly Away Peter

Intended as a hymn of praise for firm parents ruling the roost over their restless young adults on the brink of marriage and independence. But prevailing values have changed so much that probably few people nowadays will share the assumptions underlying this movie.

Parents who regard a 24 year old as too young to leave home, who won't allow an adult daughter a house key in case she stays out too late, and who expect the right of veto over their children's choice of marriage partners, might well be seen these days as doing a less than adequate job.

Like all moral crusaders, the generation who made this movie didn't realize that by turning the spotlight on their own narrow-minded value system they ran the risk of holding themselves up to ridicule rather than praise.

Did the Rank organization have hopes of competing with the Huggetts family series when they went into production with this one? It's clearly based on a two-act family drama about a family where the children are growing up, the acts separated by a couple of years, and with minimal expansion to account for the fact that not everything has to happen on the same set: a couple of shots in the street and one upstairs manages that.

Also, the Hapgood family is clearly middle class. All the men have office jobs or are in public school or are being sent to Africa by the firms. It's bland and well performed, directed and shot and a good time-waster by all concerned. If there is nothing that stands out as surprisingly good, there's nothing to complain about this slightly old-fashioned storm-in-a-teapot movie.