Director: Ken Annakin
On the surface, much of Value for Money seems familiar of Hollywood romantic comedies of the 1950s—gold diggers, dance numbers, and more than a little innuendo. In fact, in 1955 star Diana Dors was at the top of her career having been christened the “English Marilyn Monroe.” And yet, if much of the picture plays like a typical Monroe vehicle, the cultural context couldn’t be any more different. Value for Money is both a regional comedy (there are many in-jokes regarding accents and subtle differences in characterization depending on locale) and a product of the post-war era, resulting in a comedy of radical juxtapositions and cynicism—while Dors is the epitome of class, she is a direct contrast to the shabby town of Batley (the picture was actually partly filmed in West Yorkshire), distinguished by its remarkable drabby cobble streets coated with soot. Similarly, although the target of the gold digger is a wealthy man, he is literally haunted by the voice of his penny-pinching father—John Gregson plays the man with an endearing sense of self-deprecation, and his early courtship with Dors is kept interesting due to their shifting dynamic (as expected, she only becomes insistent in their relationship after she learns of the extent of his riches). Susan Stephen is quite good in the comparatively small role as Gregson’s fiancée. Although characters like her are often limited to sitting on the sidelines until their lovers get enough sense to come back to them, Stephen shows a steadfastness in her interactions with Gregson—she is not a humiliated victim, but rather a woman who is more than willing to walk out if her man doesn’t come to his senses in due time.
Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 1948, arthur crabtree, harold french, ken annakin, quartet, ralph smart
Director(s): Ken Annakin, Harold French, Arthur Crabtree & Ralph Smart
Anthology films have a certain irresistibly to them but are very rarely satisfying as a whole. More often than not, critics talk about these films by distinguishing between the chapters—it is common to select favorites and wholly dismiss others. Quartet is an unusually great example of the genre in that its stories build upon each other, so much so that the final chapter is graced with the cumulative power of everything that’s come before. If the four stories that comprise the film are distinct from one another, they nonetheless are unified by a certain attitude towards relationships. The last two of these stories are based on shorts from W. Somerset Maugham’s collection Creatures of Circumstance, which is a perfectly apt title to describe the often beset upon characters who strive to get by, prone to selfishness on their way to happiness. Maugham’s great masterpiece The Moon and Sixpence considered the problem of the pursuit of freedom when burdened by social responsibilities, and so too do these four stories involve characters butting heads for no particular reason other than their way of life contradicts with the people around them. In “The Colonel’s Lady”, which ends the film, Cecil Parker plays a man who is brought to shame when he realizes that he’s been poor to the woman who still desperately loves and pines for him. That the film doesn’t end in an easy reconciliation is a moment of unusual genus—there is no solution that redeems all that has come before, rather it becomes clear that there were many wasted years due to a failure of communication.
Director: Ken Annakin
In the third act of Swiss Family Robinson, the eponymous clan fends off the attacks of hordes of non-white pirates through a series of carefully contrived booby traps. It’s as bizarre a sequence as any in Disney’s history–look, for instance, at the glee in which a young boy (Kevin Corcoran) throws a coconut grenade at an approaching enemy, or his excitement to see his allies crushed to death. What’s particularly unusual is that the picture approaches these sequences as characteristic of family bonding, where the unit is gathered together in the spirit of strengthening their relationships by defeating their foes. Very little has changed tonally from a previous scene in which they dressed in bright colors and rode animals, and yet now they are leaving corpses in their wake. While it might be a stretch to get too sociopolitical in discussing the issues of race at play and, in particular, the way the film demonstrates colonialism (Corcoran hops on a tortoise immediately after stepping foot on the island, as if claiming his territory), the film has some camp pleasures to be had in its utter irresponsibility regarding such issues. Dorothy McGuire, one of the most interesting actresses of the 1940s, is unfortunately wasted (she is a woman and this is a Disney movie after all), but John Mills is solid as the patriarch.
Director: Ken Annakin
A comedic fantasy in the vein of I Married a Witch, Miranda stars Glynis Johns as a man-hungry mermaid who gets to fulfill her wish of experiencing life as a citizen of London. While the fantasy element is exploited to its fullest in the earliest sequences (the magical cave that Johns brings Griffith Jones to is beautifully rendered by cinematographer Ray Elton and art director George Paterson), much of the picture plays like a standard sex farce in which the status quo is upset by an enchanting outsider. Googie Withers is well-cast as the wife of Jones, who first reacts jealously upon Miranda’s arrival but eventually treats her husband’s crush as a schoolboy fantasy that he will outgrow. Withers first suspects that Miranda is more than she seems due to a few missing fish in a fishbowl, and Miranda’s unusual appetite is further alluded to in the one truly hilarious sight gag in which she swallows a fish whole during a zoo’s feeding time and then proceeds to bark back at the angered seals. In the last scene of the film, it is shown that she has returned to the sea to spawn. It’s a suggestive, brilliantly naughty image that makes one reexamine the sexual dynamics of the picture: this is a film about a man who has sex with a fish and then brings it home to his wife.
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