Fate Takes a Hand

When a stolen postbag is recovered some 15 years after a robbery.

It is up to Post Officer worker security officer Tony (Ronald Howard) to unite the five letter founds in the bag to the intended recipients.

He is accompanied by newspaper reporter Karon who is interested in the human angle part of the story.

Fate Takes a Hand is a vignettes of five stories. The first one is more comedic, the meek man who thinks he won big money in a competition.

So he tells his blustering boss what he thinks of him and then quits his job. The winning cheque never arrived but he did receive a surprising visitor.

The second one is the saddest and bittersweet of them all. A young woman who was disfigured and blinded during the war. The letter is from her lover, a RAF pilot killed during the war.

Karon reads out the story but keeps back the truth.

The most profound has Peter Butterworth in a straight dramatic role. He plays Ronnie a punch drunk ex boxer who hangs around a boxing gym as he has nowhere else to go.

Ronnie was once a promising fighter who was cheated by one manager then wrongly told to take a fall by another. It resulted in Ronnie getting a beating by a gangster.

His letter is an attempt on atonement by someone who cheated him.

It is all rather lightweight and low budget but the stories are appealing enough.

Fifteen years after a mail robbery, the loot is recovered, along with four letters. It's up to Ronald Howard to track down the recipients, because the mail must go through. Newspaper reporter Christina Gregg goes along, hoping for a human interest story or two. It turns out there are five.

It's a series of pleasant vignettes, some with humor, but all of them offering at least a bit of comfort to the recipients. It's not a particularly profound movie. Indeed, it would have made a nice TV series along the lines of The Millionaire. Max Varnel directs lightly for a pleasant second feature.

This film is a sort of portmanteau.Letters lost 15 years before being finally delivered by the post office,now that's a likely story.As with all such films they rest entirely on the individual stories.I felt the the film was least successful when it lapsed into trade by and more successful when it kept matters light such as the episode with the wife planting a stooge so she could get a divorce with a big settlement.The biggest surprise was the last story.Peter Butterworth plays a boxer who pays dearly when he crosses a fight fixing gang.He has such a launch that it makes the whole idea pretty daft.Generally the film is reasonably entertaining.

An hour-long programmer that feels like a pilot for a reality TV-series with Christina Gregg, who starred in several crime thrillers, which FATE TAKES A HAND has only a little to do with, but it's important since, fifteen-years earlier, a batch of letters were stolen in a heist, and having turned up it's now the British Post Office's duty to return each to a bevy of eclectic characters...

Christina Gregg plays a reporter tagging along with Ronald Howard, meeting the would-be-recipients at home or work, each telling a flashback yarn about how bad their lives have gotten for which each letter will mend...

These tales include a love-lorn blind woman, paling to the rudimentary comic relief of a working man standing up to his boss after winning money... while the most earthy has a prisoner recollecting a little girl's kidnapping...

Then the last two are the most important: One about a husband being framed by a crooked wife... the only to occur before and after the letter-carrying-duo arrive...

And a punchy ex-brawler who "could have been a contender" before throwing a fight... Making this not so much a Christina Gregg vehicle but a window seat she breezily looks out of.

Now showing on TPTV in July 2025 in the UK so see it if you can as it's a very entertaining film.

The stories of how the delayed letters affects the intended recipients is nicely varied and a mixture of good that they were delayed and bad that they were delayed.

As mentioned elsewhere it was very obvious that the Triumph Herald car had no windscreen and no wipers.

I had thought that those affected would all have been posh people but they weren't so this gave some variety.

A new version could be made of this film but as few get letters these days it may have to be about delayed messages to mobile phones.