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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.

I bumped up the user rating on this film to 8/10 as I was disappointed to see it rated so low at 5.2/10.This 1951 film is mainly acted out on one set - a suburban house - so I suspect it was again another filmed stage play.The plot concerns the marriage teething problems of two couples who share the same house, Joan Greenwood (Sabina Pennant), Nigel Patrick (Rodney Pennant) and Helen Cherry ((Mary Banning - Sabina's elder career minded sister), Derek Farr (Bruce Banning).

After WWII in Britain many married couples had to live with their parents (or in-laws) as mortgages for owner occupied properties were very difficult to obtain then.Many houses had been blitzed and the Government started a "prefab" scheme to rehouse poorer occupants.I was born in 1946 and was therefore 5 years old when this was filmed but I can empathise with the post war economic problems having lived then as a child.

The main problem for ex-actress Joan Greenwood (mother to a 2 1/2 year old son) is to find a reliable nanny after the first one (Fabia Drake) leaves "in a huff".Likewise career mother, Helen Cherry, is mother to a young 2 year old daughter.As Sabina is getting stressed out coping with all the housework (laundry/food preparation/child care etc.), her sister finds a veritable treasure replacement nanny (Athene Seyler) whom she finds in the park.Due to a silly misunderstanding concerning morality with the nanny, the couples have to pretend to be married to each other.

The farce is further complicated by the addition of two friends who regularly pop into the house, Guy Middleton, (Victor Manifold), who is close to Sabina and a 22 year old Audrey Hepburn (Eve Lester), who is close to Rodney.Of course there are pretend affairs, rows, reconciliations in true farce style.The acting is professional rep. standard.This was the first time I had seen this film and I enjoyed it immensely.

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 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.

This damaged film was probably only recovered because it has a young Audrey Hepburn, way down the credits list. There are quite a few missing frames after 00:35. The film itself, adapted from a wordy radio play, is a domestic farce-drama with two middle class couples living in a supposedly crowded but seemingly spacious house in the suburbs during the postwar housing shortage. No doubt on the wireless - for which it was originally written - it could have sounded suitably claustrophobic and drab. However the cinema was about fantasy, and the producers decided to set in the film in what would have been considered at the time fabulous middle class luxury. No attempt was made to adapt it for that change. They look for a nanny - even though one of the women has no job and could presumably look after two children - and this and an absolute rotter in an Austin Atlantic lead to a dreadful situation. Product placement - Lux soap flakes.