Young Wives' Tale

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.

Sabina (Joan Greenwood) and Mary (Helen Cherry) are both married sisters who also have a child each of a similar age.

Sabina is a former actress now a young housewife married to writer Rodney.

Meanwhile both Mary and her sedate husband Bruce go out to work.

It leaves Sabina to look after the house and cook for them all. There is a nanny that cares for the children but she leaves when Bruce is rude to her.

To remedy the situation, Mary quickly finds a replacement and this time they pass both the kids off as siblings.

Later for some unfathomable reason. Sabina ends up kissing two men, one of them being Bruce.

This annoys both Mary and Rodney who ends up kissing lovelorn lodger Eve (Audrey Hepburn.)

This is a middle class farce that is not funny and very much of its time. It is very sedate probably due to the censorship laws of the time.

I had no idea why Sabina ended up kissing the other men and I expected both Mary and Rodney to be enraged.

There was no social commentary here. The house was spacious when it was meant to demonstrate the post war housing crisis.

Sabina was not much of a housewife, unable to cook for four adults when she had a nanny to mind the kids.

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.

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.