Fièvre blonde

Filmed partly on location in the West Yorkshire town of Batley (given the name Barfield in the film), you know what you are going to get as soon as you watch that Salvation Army band marching up the cobbled market place in the drizzle and soot. Good fun for those of us who live in the town spotting the landmarks. Batley's a lot cleaner now, and the buildings are sandstone again instead of black - it still rains a bit though.

Chaley (John Gregson) owns a rag mill, the economy of the town for much of the twentieth century being based on recycling rags into reconstituted cloth known as either 'Shoddy' (now used as an adjective), or 'Mungo'. And he does what all Rugby League fans do once a year, and that's head south for the sport's Challenge Cup Final. Taking the local stories into account, the weekend trip is as traditional as ever, involving a lot of beer, food and going to clubs and pubs - and the final itself of course.

However, it's not usual for one of the girls in a club to follow you back north in the hope of parting you from your money - and that's when the fun starts in 'Value for Money', especially if you already have a girl back home who's 'sweet on you'.

Good-natured comic shenanigans follow that pulls the legs of stereotypical northerners and southerners alike. Luckily, the twain shall meet after a few plot twists and turns, and it all works out right in the end.

Note - Fifty years after the film was released, people in the town still sometimes refer to Batley as Barfield, and you can here the name being shouted from the terraces at Mount Pleasant (Batley RLFC's ground) on many occasions.

Eh, it's grim 'oop north.

Batley as it looked in the fifties got the film star treatment photographed in Technicolor & VistaVision by top cameraman Geoffrey Unsworth masquerading as the fictitious mill town of Barfield in this silly farce in which parsimonious northerner John Gregson inherits £62k from his old man (seen solely in pictures played by an uncredited Frederick Piper) and visits the fleshpots of London where we're treated to a breathtakingly vulgar and gaudy musical number before he falls for the voluptuous charms of hard and brassy Diana Dors.

Miss Dors (who at one point dives into a swimming pool in a bikini, plainly doubled for the dive itself, and emerging from the water her blonde mane still dry & set) demonstrates she sure knew how to spend money in those long-ago days when a seven-bedroom timbered house in the North of England cost a eye-watering £5,800.

Diana Dors was billed as the British Marilyn Monroe. A few years before her death I saw her opening an arcade in the Isle of Man. By that time she had ballooned in weight but she still could bring out the crowds. I was only a kid so did not really know what all the fuss was about.

In Value for Money, Dors plays glamourous singer and actress Ruthine West who gets enticed up to Batley to open a children's play area.

The cause for her relocation from chic London is Chayley Broadbent (John Gregson) who has inherited his father's textile fortune. Like his later father Chayley is a miser who watches the pennies. His long suffering fiancée Ethel, a local journalist wants Chayley to go to London to enjoy himself and find a purpose away from his father's penny pinching ways. He finds Ruthine in a show instead and instantly falls in love with her.

So Chayley, Ruthine and Ethel are in Batley. Ruthine hates the grim Yorkshire industrial town but likes Chayley's money. Ethel hangs around patiently for Chayley to come to his senses.

Value for Money is a colourful light romantic comedy, with a couple of nice musical numbers.

Chayley is a shallow fool who is always hearing his late father's muttering about not driving a hard enough bargain. It is a bit of froth and fun. Dors does look slim and sexy. It is a mildly entertaining movie with dated views on women.

"Chayley" (John Gregson) comes from good Yorkshire stock where thrift and prudence are the order of the day. That attitude is thrown to the wind, though, when on a visit to London he encounters the glamorous and charming nightclub entertainer "Ruth" (Diana Dors). Now she knows when she is onto a good thing, as soon has this poor lad hook line and sinker. Despite his upbringing, and the ghost of his father warning him of the coming dangers, he is powerless - he is addicted to her, and soon she has come to his town, they are engaged, and she is looking for a nice big house. Can he see reason before it's too late? Is she really quite such a gold-digger? For the first half hour, when it's just the two at the top of the bill, then the film - and the dialogue - work quite well. You can see her manoeuvring the vulnerable but proud young man and it looks like both are having fun. For the rest of this, though, it really is just a bit of a stereotype-fest that runs through the joke as quickly as she would run through his inheritance. It's always good to see Ernest Thesiger (the doting "Lord Dewsbury)" and there are a few lively cameos but not enough to sustain this after about an hour when the writing is on the wall for a rather tame solution that lets it all fizzle out. The moral might be, though - always check your restaurant bill!

This is a gentle comedy that meanders along in a fairly charming and harmless way. It isn't one of the best comedies of this period but it features a good cast, is nicely directed and is beautifully shot.

Gregson's accent is not that of a Batley (Barfield) resident but whether he could have managed it or not, the real thing might have been too much for most UK audiences leave alone those in the rest of the world.

The film portrays a few stereotypes; the Yorkshire folk who are pretty straightforward but 'careful' with money and those in London, many of whom are little better than two-faced thieves by comparison. They could easily have gone further, but they went far enough as it was. I found the interjections of Chaley's deceased father rather funny, but not that much else was any more than pleasantly amusing. The scenes in which Diana Dors (real name 'Fluck', which was understandably changed "should one of the bulbs go out when my name is in lights") appears in public and generates a major stir are probably quite realistic; at the time she was a star/sex symbol on the up (amongst other things there were 3-D nude photos of her published the previous year) and this film was one of five she did that was released in 1955.

If you like Britsh comedies of the period, have a local connection to Batley, or are a big Gregson or Dors fan, this should certainly be seen. For others it is still well worth viewing just for Unsworth's excellent photography and as something of a period piece.