Passport to Pimlico (1949)

 "Blimey! I'm a foreigner!"

It's ridiculous that I hadn't seen this iconic Ealing comedy until last night but, well, now I have. And it's brilliant, obviously. But it wasn't quite what I expected. And I'm not just talking about the scene with a pig in a parachute..

This is very visibly and very deliberately set in a post-war London of rationing and bomb sites. An unexploded bomb looms large. There are constant references to the privations the characters all went through a few years earlier. In the late 1940s, this is what it means to be British... and yet, the characters are all fun, quick-witted, likeable and enjoying life regardless. This is not the privately educated England of the stiff upper lip, but the real England of beer and belly laughs.

...Until it isn't. The central conceit is that, suddenly, this little street on Pimlicois in fact, legally, a random surviving remnant of the Duchy of Burgundy, with a descendant of Charles the Bold as its sovereign. The film plays, for laughs of course, all the difficulties ofva community finding itself as a microstate, with no pre-existing law, government, police, armed forces or foreign relations. Indeed, the film gets surprisingly abstract and philosophical as it humorously examines the very concept of nationhood. It's a nice touch that the microstate enjoys a massive heatwave while it's Burgundyy but, as soon as it's British again, the heavens open...

The cast is superb. Stanley Holloway is perfect, a strikingly young Charles Hawtrey has a memorable role, but for me it's Margaret Rutherford's eccentric professor who stealds the show. This is a fine little comedy but also quietly intelligent in its themes, and a fascinating little time capsule.

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)

 "To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness."

Somehow, in twelve years of blogging, I've somehow contrived never to blog and adaptation of an Oscar Wilde play, something which must be remedied forthwith. Comedy, often though not always, tends to date as the decades pass. Not only to tastes in humour change but so so the social more on which the humour depends. Yes Oscar Wilde remains as funny in 2023 as in 1895, as shown by this, the last of the style of plays for which he is most known, before his sad, complex, undeserved and much misunderstood downfall. Wilde should have lived and written for many more decades.

We no longer live in a world defined by the Season and the obliquely shifting snobbish oddities of the aristocracy: indeed, most of us never did. Yet we do not feel alienated. There is no anger aimed at the upper classes here, mainly observation, yet the humour skewers this world with perfection. Interesting that this, the result of aestheticism, should come from an author who, wearing another hat, happened to be a socialist.

This film is, perhas, unambitious in its direction, being little more than a stage play with a camera pointed at it, which it cheerfully confesses by presenting itself in this way. Yet it is perfection. Oh, Michaels Redgrave and Denison are merely quite good as Jack and Algy. Joan Greenwood is better, the poshest woman who ever lived and born to play Gwendoline. Yet Dorothy Tutin excels as Cecily. Any version of this play, though, stands or falls by its Lady Bracknell. And Edith Evans is simply THE Lady Bracknell. All other performances of the part are but a shadow of hers. It is she who makes this production simply unsurpassable.