Miss MacTaggart Won't Lie Down

I have not seen this for many years, but remember this short film fondly. A spinster who has been proclaimed dead when it is her sister who has died, has to reclaim her identity by committing crimes. A lot of humour comes from sweet old Barbara Mullen doing unnatural acts to get a criminal record and regain her name.

MISS MACTAGGART WON'T LIE DOWN is a short comic effort from prolific director Francis Searle, here working at the tail-end of his career. It's a genteel effort with a Scottish setting about a kindly old woman who arrives in her home town to find that she's technically dead (her twin sister died and was mistaken for her).

The old lady becomes increasingly frustrated by the lack of recognition and turns to crime to regain her identity. Although the running time is just 30 minutes, there's a lot of incident packed into the length of this short feature and it's quite amusing too. The cast are obviously enjoying themselves and who are we to criticise them? This picture tends to be a lot funnier than Searle's other short efforts from the period.

Francis Searle's first film in colour reflects the struggle to disinter the buried union card in the same year's 'Death of a Bureaucrat'.

Because exaggerated reports of her death mean she can no longer withdraw money from her local post office, Jeannie MacPherson is forced to prove she's still alive by committing antisocial acts like breaking windows, playing bagpipes in the small hours and planting an unexploded haggis under the Houses of Parliament in this gentle satire on bureaucracy reminiscent of the refusal of the rest of the company in 'Catch-22' to accept that Doc Daneeka isn't dead despite his protestations to the contrary.

When Jeannie MacTaggart returns to her home village after a short break to Glasgow. The locals are shocked and think they are seeing a ghost.

They believed that Jeannie MacTaggart had died. They even attended her funeral. It turns out it was her unbeknownst twin sister who collapsed and died while visiting her.

Now that Jeannie MacTaggart has been officially declared dead. She ceases to exist. No small minded official wants to help her.

So she launches a campaign of petty crime and harassment to come back to life. After all if she is legally dead, she cannot be arrested. (Maybe Miss MacTaggart should had taken her late sister's identity!)

Miss MacTaggart Won't Lie Down is an independent short, styled like an Ealing type farce. It makes pointed comments on sleepy small village officialdom.

The type that made a mistake, quickly got Miss MacTaggart wrongly declared dead. Stopped her bank account but would not lift a finger to rectify the situation.

Not even contact the Scottish Secretary or the Home Office to help out Miss MacTaggart.

It ends with an official telling Miss MacTaggart to contact an Ombudsman. A Scandinavian thing. Back in the 1960s, going to an Ombudsman was a rare thing. Now we have all types of Ombudsmen.

I enjoyed this short and is was indeed possible to walk up to the front door of 10 Downing Street as I did about 1973, there were no barriers back then. A charming wee Scottish film shown on TPTV in the UK where many older and unusual films can be found but which are probably of little interest to anyone under the age of 50 or so.

Watch this to see a slice of Scottish life which in some small villages it has probably not changed much since 1966, except that there are a lot more cars about of course.

She became a one woman crime wave to get what she wanted. Not the best of endings but we can presume that it was a happy one.