29 Acacia Avenue

It has been mentioned in another review that there is no mention of World War 2.I wonder if it was the intention to set this in the thirties.The point is that all of the beating around the bush about sex must have seemed very tame if not dated to a generation that had just emerged from a world war.Where the attitudes to sex and marriage had been radically altered.Where sex before marriage had become much more the accustomed thing.So to see the main couple go through the film bickering about it must surely have seemed strange if not totally unrealistic.Also odd to see Jimmy Hanley spurning his real life wife,Dinah Sheridan for an older woman.Gordon Harker gives his usual first rate performance.One final point,it is all very well to have postcards sent from foreign destinations but who posted them abroad?

This low key British comedy is actually refreshing in that the middle class suburban Robinson family is not dysfunctional and all of the family members actually like one another. Mr. And Mrs. Robinson are a contented married couple who are about to take a Mediterranean cruise; their motive for doing this is that their bragging neighbors have already taken a couple of such cruises. Their grown son and daughter both decline going as they each have a love interest that they would rather pursue, the son with a sophisticated woman of the world and the daughter with her fiancé. At the last minute, the Robinsons decide that they would really rather vacation in Bognor Regis, a place they had been going to for years. They return home earlier than expected, much to the consternation of their children, especially the daughter who had invited her fiancé to stay at the house. The two underlying themes of sex and class are often very amusingly presented even if by today's standards out dated and quaint. Gordon Harker as Mr. Robinson is a real treat. Betty Balfour as Mrs. Robinson doesn't make much of an impression. Just ten years previously Harker and Balfour appeared together in the really good film 'Squibs', Harker played Balfour's father in that one. Of the British early post war films I've seen, this is the only one that I recall that makes no mention of WWII or of post war hardship. Even so, it represents a nice slice of life of a bygone time.

Old married couple Gordon Harker and Betty Balfour (in her last screen role) are scheduled to take a Mediterranean cruise. They wimp out and go to Bognor Regis, leaving son Jimmy Hanley and daughter Jill Evans to manage the suburban house. But Hanley gets involved with a married woman, and Miss Evans gets engaged to Hubert Gregg, and there are issues to sort out before a satisfactory ending to the movie.

I was particularly surprised by this tempest-in-a-teacup domestic comedy coming out in 1945. With the War raging, did the film makers really think people would be interested in clearly pre-war goings on? Perhaps it was seen as a return to normalcy, a time in which people could break an engagement because of wedding gifts. It might have played well in 1938, but...

Looking at it as a movie from seven years earlier, it's a pleasantly performed comedy. Harker and Miss Balfour are amusing as the ossified elder couple, and the tiffs among the younger folks are clearly the sort of issues to be settled quickly in the third act, just the sort of movie to serve as a pleasant evening out at the suburban local theater.... a lifetime earlier.

"29 Acacia Avenue" is a undemanding domestic comedy aimed at lower middle-class British audiences - the cinematic equivalent in its day of a popular three-act play ('Scene: A Drawing Room') performed at the local repertory theatre. Not only the subject-matter and handling but also the slightly stagey acting prompt this comparison. Alternatively, it might be viewed today as a forerunner of various cosy TV sitcoms concerning good-natured but anxious parents trying to cope with the emotional lives of grown-up children still living at home.

The father of the family and inevitable comic lead is Mr Robinson (played by Gordon Harker), a lugubrious bowler-hatted commuter who gets very upset by next-door's dog digging up his begonias. He and his wife feel compelled to keep up with the neighbours in respect of holiday plans, even though they would really prefer their traditional week at Bognor Regis to a Mediterranean cruise. 'I'm not so keen on these foreign parts,' admits Mr Robinson.

And can young Peter and Joan be trusted to behave themselves while Mum and Dad are away? Maybe not. Naive Peter (Jimmy Hanley) gets himself entangled with a seductive older woman, while Joan and her fiancé Michael fret at the frustrations of being engaged ('like driving a car with the accelerator and the brake on at once'). Even Shirley the maid (Megs Jenkins) wonders just how far she should go with her boyfriend Fred ('Have you ever known ecstasy, my girl?'). In 1945, all this contemplation of pre-marital sex must have seemed very daring. To modern eyes, of course, it is tame indeed.

The other standard comic component is class. The Robinsons are lower middle-class folk on their way up (on a par with the Gibbons family in 'This Happy Breed', made the previous year). The children are rather posher than their parents - Joan (Jill Evans) has obviously had plenty of elocution lessons! - but even they feel occasional unease when they get themselves attached to confidently upper middle-class partners. Fine wines, butlers, and family silver are outside their experience. The humour is gentle and thoroughly predictable, yet "29 Acacia Avenue" certainly offers some glimpses into English social attitudes of the 1940s (though the action takes place in a London suburb where World War II apparently never impinged).