Kind hearts, ladykillers and whisky galore: Ealing comedies – ranked!
19. Another Shore (1948)
Anyone wanting a look at Dublin in the late 1940s might like this, but there’s not much else especially compelling about this weird Walter Mitty-ish comedy about a park loafer hoping to finance a one-way trip to the South Seas by helping rich people who have fallen over. Inspired by the anywhere-but-here mood of postwar privations, this is pretty charmless, and almost completely tone-deaf to the class/ethnic sensitivities of a crew of posh Brits rolling around the Irish capital. Not director Charles Crichton’s finest hour.
18. Meet Mr Lucifer (1953)
A not especially subtle anti-TV screed, structured like La Ronde with a television set passed from household to household sowing unexpected crises in its wake. Stanley Holloway, by then second to Alec Guinness as Ealing’s star performer, had the showy linking role of music-hall devil, but the whole struggles to transcend its theatrical (and protheatre) origins, adapted as it is from a play by Arnold Ridley (later to achieve immortality as Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army).
17. His Excellency (1952)
Another play adaptation that doesn’t quite overcome its stage roots, but it has an interesting slant on the tail-end of empire. A bluff union man (played by Eric Portman in professional
Yorkshireman mode) is sent out by the Labour government to oversee a restive Mediterranean colony (a fictional cross between Cyprus and Gibraltar) and tries to get the local people on side by supporting a dockworkers strike. But its small-c conservative ending, in which the Labourite agrees to cooperate with the wily Colonial Office chappie already in place, really doesn’t get to the heart of why Britain was divesting itself of its overseas possessions in the first place.
16. Hue & Cry (1947)
Ealing’s first big comedy success has more than a whiff of the Children’s Film Foundation about it, with its scrappy gang of comic-book reading teens unmasking a gang of crooks after enlisting the cooperation of creepy author Alastair Sim. (Title of their favourite comic: The Trump.) It’s mainly remarkable now for the evidence of the pounding London took during the Blitz: the city’s war wounds were still fresh and raw.
15. A Run for Your Money (1949)
Ealing liked its crews to get out and about, and this one travels (briefly) to the fictional Welsh village of Hafoduwchbenceubwllymarchogcoch for a cheery comedy about brothers heading to London to collect a £200 prize and tickets for the big rugby match, and getting into various scrapes along the way. Although it deals in the broadest possible ethnic stereotypes, it’s entirely affectionate and a pretty amiable watch, as well as benefiting from Guinness showing up as an ineffectual nature correspondent assigned to escort the brothers around town.
14. The Magnet (1950)
Another excursion to the regions, this child-focused comedy which takes place largely in Liverpool’s seaside satellite New Brighton, is about an 11year-old who tricks a little kid out of a giant magnet but then becomes guiltridden and gets rid of it, and thereby learns life lessons. With his dramaschool vowels, child star James Fox doesn’t exactly sound like a local – in contrast, and to the film’s credit, to the gang of slum kids who hide him from