6/10
Yolande Donlan Stars
13 January 2023
Yolande Donlan finds herself in a swap. She is sent to a small English village, while a girl from that place is sent to America. There's a lot of fish-out-of-water and two-nations-separated-by-a-common-language humor, but the people are pleasant, welcoming, and insist on serving her coffee, which she politely drinks while despising it. Michael Rennie is on hand to serve as love interest, and Peter Butterworth and Jon Pertwee as local characters. Garry Marsh plays the mayor in a relatively straight manner.

That's not enough for a movie. A crisis arises. More than half of the houses in the village are deemed uninhabitable, and the drainage system is a mess. Central planning in London deems it more economical to move the population, which they hate. The sorting out of the situation takes up the second half of the movie. In many ways,writer-director Val Guest has devised a movie that struck me as arising from the same impulses as the Ealing Comedies, in which a small group of people.

The copy I looked at looks like it was derived from a 16mm. Print via VHS. There's no record of it having played on British or Australian television, although it was telecast in Los Angeles in 1950. Given that the only material on it seems to be this print and a 16mm. One held by the BFI, you might wish to give this agreeable feature a viewing on its own terms.
0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

Recently Viewed