The March Hare

I've not seen this film since I was about 10 years old, but can remember screaming with laughter! As far as I can recall the story was set in Ireland, and was about a racehorse who couldn't race successfully until it had been told a 'magic' word provided by the Little People. Why isn't it available on video?

It is difficult to know what this film was supposed tobe.What it isn't is entertaining.The music is awful and overly intrusive.Fiscal seems to be doing a bad impersonation of Barry Fitzgerald.The only funny thing in this film are the cartoons in the title sequence.

Normally it took John Ford to make a film set in Ireland as phoney as this!

There must have been quite an audience for films about gee-gees for Eastmancolour (sic) and CinemaScope (beautifully shot by Jack Hildyard) to have been lavished upon this gallumphing nonsense so soon after Ealing Studios squandered Technicolor on 'The Rainbow Jacket'; complete with an excruciating 'Oirish' score by Philip Green. (At least horse racing and the wide screen make a good fit; although the final race meet is over surprisingly quickly.)

Stringer Davis plays a doctor in a rare appearance in a film without his wife Margaret Rutherford; while Charles Hawtry turns out to have only a very brief role indeed. Raymond Glendenning as himself sports his luxuriant real moustache while Reginald Beckwith also has a weird little one in his brief cameo as an insurance broker.

Peggy Cummins hardly looks a day older than in 'Green Grass of Wyoming' several years earlier; but sadly discards her trousers for party frocks (along, thankfully, with her American accent) after returning from finishing school. There's quite a bit a sex talk between her and Terence Morgan, but he's such a wet blanket it comes across as creepy rather than saucy...

"Hilariously funny!?!?"

I think the reviewers here are watching a different film or yet again remembering/viewing it with VERY rose tinted glasses.

Don't think I even smiled once, and boring. Mind you I'm not a fan of horse racing so that doesn't help.

I saw The March Hare at HOYTS Double Bay Theatre in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs during 1957 when in High School at Bondi, and recall it with fondness as very funny and quite entertaining. With Martita Hunt and other cast members of similar standing, the entertainment quality is obvious. Have been unable, over the years, to view it again as it seems to have disappeared completely. A pristine new widescreen (CinemaScope) DVD is well overdue, noting that the perennial Three Men In a Boat, also a British film, from the same year (1956) has just been remastered to DVD in England. Three Men has been aired on various TV Channels in Sydney many times, most recently on the ABC couple weeks back but The March Hare seems never to have been aired at all! Still waiting and hoping.

Eric Glasby