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The gliding camera takes inventory of the Salford boot shop until it comes upon the slanting shadow of the owner (Charles Laughton), whose victorious climb of the formidable staircase in his sloshed condition is celebrated with an ascending crane shot and a little pirouette. A tale of "the rebellious females of this household," namely the widowed blowhard's younger daughters itching for marriage (Daphne Anderson, Prunella Scales) and the the eldest one "too useful to part with" (Brenda de Banzie). She gains her emancipation via an entrepreneurial engagement, the meek shoemaker toiling beneath the floorboards (John Mills) is the forced groom, "a business idea in the shape of a man." The changing of the guard, weathered by the squashed patriarch with cup in hand. "If I'm to be beaten by drink, I'll die fightin'." The gag is an Industrial Revolution Lear, staged by David Lean in a sustained swelling of amusement. Courtship is "all glitter and no use to nobody," certainly not to the budding Iron Lady, the most implacable member of the director's gallery of headstrong heroines. Pygmalion reversed for the making of a man, the timorous laborer who stands up to the old boss under the aegis of the new boss. ("You're growing on me," he stammers to the ruthless bride, then collects his courage on their honeymoon as the bedroom door opens in the background.) Laughton luxuriates marvelously in the role of "a dunderheaded lump of obstinacy," his carved cabbage mug recoiling at a slice of foul cake, a shambling ballet after lunar reflections on cobblestone puddles. Willful daughter or hallucinatory rodent, he must pick his monster. "I've been diddled." Hitchcock's The Farmer's Wife and Asquith's Quiet Wedding are among the main precedents, a noble comic English lineage. With Richard Wattis, Derek Blomfield, Helen Haye, Joseph Tomelty, Julien Mitchell, Philip Stainton, Gibb McLaughlin, Dorothy Gordon, Madge Brindley, Jack Howarth, and John Laurie. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |