Young Wives' Tale

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.

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.

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 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.

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.