Racconto di giovani mogli

If you enjoy spending time with a bunch of irritating, childish characters who spend their entire time squabbling and shouting ( usually accompanied by the loud wails of a crying child) you'll love this one. If you don't ???....... avoid it like the plague!

The only reason to watch it is to see Audrey Hepburn's. First featured role. It's not a big part but,. Her Star quality is obvious to all. You can see why, just over two years later, she had an Oscar on her shelf.

I love this comedy and have watched it umpteen times. I haven't seen it for a while so the details of the plot escape me, but they don't really matter. What is so good about it is the unselfconscious depiction of London picking itself up after World War II, and the relaxed comedy style of the actors, most of whom will be familiar faces to anyone who watched British TV in the '70s too. Joan Greenwood is a dream as usual - watch out for the vault over the sofa - as a young housewife feeling ever so slightly bored with staying at home and the continuing hardships of the period - and where else could you see Athene Seyler, Fabia Drake and Irene Handl all together? Last and far from least there is a charming appearance from Audrey Hepburn in her fifth film. The men are good but this is really a treasury of female performances. It's all very light and stylish without being over-glamorous, very refreshing.

Also, for serious buffs, the cinematographer was the great Erwin Hillier who worked with F.W. Murnau on 'Tabu', with Fritz Lang on 'M', and with Powell and Pressburger on 'A Canterbury Tale' and 'I Know Where I'm Going', and many other major movies.

This is a movie version of one of those brittle post-war stage farces, originally written by Ronald Jeans. Given then-current housing shortages, two couples -- Joan Greenwood & Nigel Patrick; Derek Farr & Helen Cherry -- are sharing a house. Each has one toddler, and only Miss Greenwood as dogsbody for the menage. Given her super-posh accent, she is an absolute flub at it, but she does get to show some athleticism as she leaps from one disaster to the next. When Miss Cherry locates a decent nanny for the children in the person of Athene Seyler, everyone thinks for a moment that the situation is saved, but for the purposes of the plot, they tell her the children are siblings, and she believes Miss Greenwood is married to Mr. Farr. The usual comedy of misconstruction ensues, carried on by speed and the abilities of the cast. Alas, the effort never quite opens up beyond its stage origins.

Movie fans will want to see this for a sizable supporting role by Audrey Hepburn. She plays a young woman who has a room in the house and whose salient quality is she is terrified of men. Although her character connects loosely with the plot at several points, I had the distinct impression that at some stage of the movie's origins -- perhaps before the play actually opened -- the role was actually much larger. Now it is largely vestigial, even if it is the main reason the movie is remembered.

This is one of those mediocre British farces from the early 1950s were every one rushes around talking as loudly as they can in the hope that the volume of their speech will make up for the paucity of wit contained in the script.The leading pair are Nigel Patrick in an unusual domestic role,for him anyway,and the delectable Joan Greenwood,who had recently starred magnificently in Kind Hearts and Coronets.Supporting them adequately are Helen Cherry,Guy Middleton and Athene Seyler.However the main matter of note is the featuring of Audrey Hepburn who would not long be constrained by her contract with Associated British picture Corporation.I doubt that she remembered this film with any fondness.

On the rare occasions when it turns up on British television,"TheYoung Wives' Tale" is normally billed as "starring Audrey Hepburn", but only because Hepburn went on to become an iconic star, far better known than any of the other cast members. In 1951 she was still an aspiring young actress in her pre-stardom days, and she only plays a minor role here.

The film is set in the years immediately following World War II, when Britain was suffering from a serious housing shortage. Many houses had been destroyed during the war, and the country had neither the manpower nor the financial resources to start building new ones. The film centres upon the efforts of two young married couples, Bruce and Mary and Rodney and Sabina, to overcome the shortage by sharing a house. As the house is also occupied by two young children, a live-in nanny and a young female lodger (Hepburn's role), it would probably today be classed as statutorily overcrowded, but in the late fifties and early fifties nobody seemed to worry about that.

Some attempt is made to differentiate between the personalities of the two couples. Bruce and Mary are both staid, conventional bourgeois types, working in nine-to-five jobs. Rodney and Sabina are more bohemian; he is a writer, and she a former actress, although she has given up the stage in order to be a housewife and mother to their young son, even though she seems to lack domestic skills entirely. Perhaps because her character is an ex-actress, Joan Greenwood gives a rather odd performance in the role, making Sabina the sort of actress who constantly overacts, even when she is away from the stage, and delivering even the most commonplace of lines with exaggerated dramatic intensity. (If this is what Sabina is like in her private life, I would have hated to see any of her stage performances).

Most of the humour (or perhaps I should say attempts at humour) derives from Bruce and Mary's struggles to retain the services of a nanny or from various mix-ups and misunderstandings to do with sex. This being the early fifties, however, the scriptwriters have to proceed on the basis of "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" rather than being explicit about what they actually mean. The film is based on a stage play (which I have never seen), but today it comes across as a sort of over-extended episode of a seventies domestic sitcom. Whatever humour it once possessed seems to have evaporated with the passage of over seventy years, and today it just doesn't come across as funny. Its only appeal today will probably be to Hepburn completists, and even they are likely to be disappointed at the revelation that not every film in which their idol appeared was a "Roman Holiday", "The Nun's Story" or "Breakfast at Tiffany's". 4/10.