Father's Doing Fine

An absolutely awful piece of canned theatre - with a stupid Hammond organ score - based on a 1948 farce by Noel Langley called 'Little Lambs Eat Ivy' popular enough to be deemed worthy of Technicolor.

It's good to see the glamorous Heather Thatcher as the hub of all this self-consciously 'screwball' activity, but hard to believe that director Henry Cass had only two years earlier made the sublime 'Last Holiday' (and harder still to believe he later made horror films followed by plays & films for Moral Rearmament)!

"Father's Doing Fine" Review

March 23, 2012

Lady Buckering, who has four daughters, is in bad financial straits but nonetheless lives very well – there's a butler, all the women have wonderful clothes, there's a private nurse and plenty of liquor handy. One of her daughters is about to have a baby (the father is the Attenborough character, Dougall), one is married to a pseudo-intellectual, one is rebounding from a love affair gone bad and the youngest daughter is an insufferable drama queen. Attenborough plays the stereotypically nervous father-to-be with gusto.

"Father's Doing Fine" is based on the play "Little Lambs Eat Ivy." I simply do not understand the significance of the title (yes, I know the song Mairzy Doats). The movie's title seems off kilter as well since it is the mother, Lady Buckering, around whom all the frenetic doings occur. Indeed, Lady Buckering (the delightful Heather Thatcher) has all the best lines in this farce.

For me, farce is always better as a stage production than as a movie. This movie is silly but Thatcher's and Attenborough's performances make it fun to watch.

Adapted from a radio play – not very much ! – this entirely stage set domestic drama has the actors doing monologues and sotto voce to the non – existent audience.

It follows the domestic travails of a family, including the birth of a child at their house, the woman the wife of a particularly annoying Richard Attenborough, and a "dreadful situation" between a beatnik fiancée and his girlfriend's younger sister and her callow witless boyfriend.

There are also a couple of love intrigues and an old man with an amazingly dull "radio" voice. Sidney James has a brief cameo as a cabby.

This highly energetic farce sees a widowed mother trying to keep the bailiffs from the door while simulteonously holding her family together with their various lives. It's original stage play title was the perplexing Little Lambs Eat Ivy, but equally puzzling is it's film title of Father's Doing Fine. I suspect it is a ironic tilt at the permanently anxious Dougal (Richard Attenborough), who continues to await the birth of his wife's first baby throughout the film and is anything but fine! Meanwhile his bored wife Doreen (Diane Hart) lies in bed waiting for the birth to finally happen, and is so irritated by her husband's overbearing attitude that she can't bear him to be in the room for driving her mad. And quite frankly you can't blame her! At times the whole family can do this watching this comedy.

That is not the only incident that occupies the hectic life of the somewhat eccentric Lady Buckering (Heather Thatcher) and her family. As well as an aggitated son-in-law and pregnant daughter, she has three other daughters: Catherine (Virginia McKenna), Gerda (Mary Germaine) and Bicky (Susan Stephen). Each have their own problems, with Gerda in a unhappy marriage to a snobbish and pretentious writer (Brian Worth), while youngest daughter Bicky is a wannabe actress who lives her life in much the same dramatic and overexaggerated style as the plays she performs in, with daily fall outs with her boyfriend, the equally dopey Roly (Peter Hammond). Ironically in real life Susan Stephen was a good 2 years older than Mary Germaine, and only a month younger than Virginia McKenna! As for McKenna's character Catherine, she is unmarried but seemingly grounded, but unbeknownst to mother she has a secret that faces being revealed when a face from her past appears. That comes in the shape of a debt collector called Clifford Magill, who has come to inform the absent minded Lady Buckering that she is well behind in her rent. If they cannot find the money to pay off the debt then his father will be forced to ask them to leave.

And so is set the plot. However, such is the hectic nature of the film and it's characters that the threat of eviction easily gets lost amongst the mayhem. Indeed it seems more focused on the family's eccentricities than anything else, and at times the characters can be frustrating. Heather Thatcher's character is often so absent minded or distracted by her family's trevails that you can't blame Dr Drew (George Thorpe), a man secretly in love with her being annoyed with her at times. When he suggests in one scene to just leave her family to look after themselves you can't help but agree with him, and he has further stress in trying to calm down the constantly neurotic Dougall. And then there's the ever overly dramatic Bicky, literally throwing herself about at her boyfriend or with the fit of the vapers that at times you just want to shake her. Susan Stephen, despite her character's irritations, is hugely impressive in the way she throws herself about (literally in one scene where she quarrels with her hapless and bewildered boyfriend Roly), conveying the youthful exhuberance and neurosis of the teenager perfectly. She is well matched by Peter Hammond as Roly, while there's a nice spark also between her and Brian Worth as her sister's literary snob husband Wilfred - no surprise really as the two had only just finished filming Treasure Hunt together that year. The scene where he gets her drunk after she goes to his house after an argument with her boyfriend and her later return home tipsy is amusingly done, and leads to natural misunderstandings - or is it?

What you do have in this film is a fully committed cast throwing themselves into their parts and the farce with gusto, and you cannot but admire them for their energetic displays. However, for me it proved somewhat exhausting viewing, and you wished at times it just paused for breath. It does have it's moments with gentle scenes between Virginia McKenna and Jack Watling as Catherine and McGill, while Mary Germaine is affecting in one climatic scene with screen hubby Brian Worth as she faces up to whether her marriage is worth saving and whose conclusion I wasn't expecting. But it's main joys are of the minor performers, such as Noel Purcell as Shaughnessy, playing against type as a butler not to be trusted, while Sid James is always watchable, even if his scene as a taxi driver lasts little more than a couple of minutes. Their characters are grounded in reality, which is why I felt they were more effective than the energetic eccentricity of Heather Thatcher's Lady Buckering or Richard Attenbororugh's Dougall, despite both throwing themselves wholeheartedly into their roles.

Overall, it's not a bad film, but it is frantic and exhausting, and the characters are somewhat frustrating at times. It's hard to feel too much sympathy for a family that lives in wealth whilst spending beyond their means and expecting to continue doing so despite having no money to do so. But the stars deserve some praise for launching themselves into their parts, and I can never resist the cheeky charm of Susan Stephen, who is enthusiastic in her role. For the unprepared it is energetically performed, but also frenetic and noisy, and whether you enjoy the film by the end of it or not, I would advise you to lie down in a quiet room afterwards, just to be able to collect your senses again. It's that type of a film.

The overall plot of this film is very basic and not very interesting. It's a shame that with the great cast, more couldn't be done to write a better script. The entire movie probably could be shortened down to half an hour and still be boring. If your curious give it a watch but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it.