Beauty and the Barge

Beauty and the Barge is a low wattage farce. A low budget comedy that has early appearances from Jack Hawkins and Margaret Rutherford.

Ethel Smedley (Judy Gunn) is engaged to marry a man from Canada who she has not seen for several years. She has now changed her mind and wants to do her own thing. Her father has her locked up in her room but she escapes and plans to run away. Just in time as her suitor shows up.

She is aided by crusty barge Captain Barley (Gordon Harker.) He takes a bit of a shine to her but Barley seems to like charming the ladies when he lands his boat.

Lieutenant Seton Boyne (Jack Hawkins) is also smitten by Ethel and pursues her.

The film is a knockabout comedy, it probably goes on for too long and the humour has now dated. Ethel has a modern attitude, Boyne is a little bit too creepy. The older characters pretend to be younger than they are in their pursuit for romance.

Tinny and garrulous, this trivial Twickenham potboiler manages to feel studio-bound despite being attractively mounted against a picturesque backdrop of rural England in summer.

An interesting cast are not seen at their best, with a (relatively) young Margaret Rutherford fleetingly flitting in and out of the action and an almost unrecognisable Jack Hawkins giving no hint of the actor he would later become. Gordon Harker was of course never young.

An interminable mess which isn't even salvaged by the presence of a young Margaret Rutherford and Jack Hawkins. Absolutely nothing happens for the entire movie, and the main character, a barge captain played by Gordon Harker, is an obnoxious, self-important bore