Home and Away

When Bernard Fox wins a tidy sum on the football pools, his family and friends -- parents Jack Warner and Kathleen Harrison, sisters Lana Morris and Kate O'Meara, neighbors Charles Victor and Thora Hird -- are ready to celebrate. Nothing, however, is ever simple when it comes to money.

It's a class-conscious and misogynistic comedy as the women wrangle over money and snipe at each other, particularly Margaret St. Barbe West as Miss Harrison's parvenu and money-hungry sister, and Valerie White as the sleazy mother of Fox' partner in the ticket. Warner and Harrison are fine in their sweet spots as a married couple; they had co-starred in four or five movies in the "Hugget Family" series. Clearly this movie was cast to take advantage of their star pairing.

I found it more harrowing than funny, with an assortment of unlikable women slanging each other. It shows its origins on the stage very clearly, with almost all of it taking place on one set, with a few scenes shot outdoors near the end.

While with the two leads this resembles The Huggets, it is altogether more ambitious, accomplished and entertaining than any of the Huggets series. It has two sub-plots which are quite interesting but the real heart of it is the ensemble playing of a cast of prime mature comic character actors including Kathleen Harrison, Charles Victor, Thora Hird and Leslie Henson, with Jack Warner absent from the central scene. Films derived from plays have the advantage of being honed over a long period in front of a theatre audience, and it was not difficult to guess that this too had been a play. Each character particularly in the three couples is a very clearly drawn and recognisable type, quite elaborately and amusingly so with the fussy hen-pecked"gess"-addicted Charles Victor (Warner and Victor are workmates at the local gasworks - places, now all gone, which turned coal into domestic gas and once dominated their localities with their smell, soot, gloom and huge looming structures).

The characters, dialogue, situation and locations ring entirely true for a working class family in the 1930's-40s. Whether this amuses later generations is another matter but it is quite good material, expertly played, directed and edited.

This is a well observed and tightly scripted piece. Yes it probably is more suited to stage than film but this is beautifully performed and a masterclass in comic timing. One reviewer here felt it necessary to describe it as misogynistic. The women here don't need defending from today's woke, revisionist perspective thank you very much. They are the ones in charge.

It is a comedy of manners, a social document illustrating class and gender rolls of its time and it shouldn't be dismissed or devalued because things are different today.

A Long Time Ago... there used to be the football pools. Before the National Lottery, Health Lottery, and the Postcode Lottery... even before GambleAware; everybody had a chance to put a bet on the UK's football teams. You didn't even have to leave the house as the "Pools Man" would come to you and knock upon your door.

This is the story of the Knowles family and their luck, or lack of it, with winning the pools. Things start to go awry pretty much as soon as George Knowles (Warner) starts looking for his pools sheet, which he usually keeps in his wallet. From this moment on, there are some pretty decent twists and turns. This adds both elements of comedy and drama.

There are some very witty moments in the film as the dialogue is brilliant, at times, as is the characterisations. The writers have given the audience a well structured and highly believable and realistic tale. Though this is an old film, there are situations and relationships that the viewer will still find pertinent today.

The Director, Sewell, who also had a hand in writing the film, does a good job with the camera work, though there's nothing outstanding... except for the ending. For the time, this is a nice simple special effect, which works well. It's the pace of the movie where Sewell excels. In most comedies the laughs start to wind down around the midway mark, only to build up for the climax. In this film though, the comedy is constant. Both in dialogue and in sight gags. I think this works because there are so many different characters in the film.

For example, Jack Warner and Lana Morris played father and daughter, George and Mary Knowles; These are the "Straight Men" to the rest of the cast. Harrison, who portrays Elsie Knowles, does a good job of overselling her anxiety over money and the changes it can bring. Though, at times, her screeching had my thumb hovering over the off button - luckily enough it hit the volume down instead. Thora Hird is brilliant as the neighbour and friend, Margie Groves... who likes a tipple and loves a fag. The scene where she's all dolled up for the party and is placing cakes onto plates while a fag hangs loosely between her lips is an image I won't forget too soon. It made me laugh as I used to have an aunty very similar to her. Her husband, Ted (marvellously played by Charles Victor) is a working-class tinkerer come scientist; he's trying to create a gas-powered television. He also speaks his mind, which creates a great scene when he goes head to head with Aunt Jean at the party... much to her cuckolded husband's, Uncle Tom's, humour.

Everybody in this cast is superb in their roles. Even a young Kate O'Mara does a brilliant job as Annie Knowles; the youngest daughter, who loves to revel in how sick she was, the night before, and is all too happy to tell everyone the explicit details... a real teenager.

All of this makes for great entertainment and at just one hour and twenty minutes you can't go wrong.

If you've not watched this one yet then go find a copy, or if you're in the UK it's playing on Talking Pictures on Freeview at the moment. Well worth a watch.

Dismissed by the late David Shipman as "another clinker from the same bunker as 'Where There's a Will'" and scarier than most of Vernon Sewell's horror films. It all feels as if it happened about a million years ago.

Technically it's a comedy, but as most previous reviewers have commented it actually takes a grim view indeed of working class life in a row of terraced houses in the fifties as the cast squabble over a pools win.

Thora Hird is on hand to create the same menace she later brought to 'A Kind of Loving', while the cast also includes an unrecognisable teenaged Kate O'Mara (billed as 'Merrie Carroll') in a gymslip and the only postwar film appearance of former silent comedian Leslie Henson in a high collar.