Film review

George More O’Ferrall (1952)

Outside the post office in Wyndenham, a (fictional) village in Norfolk, a woman, her face unseen, puts envelopes in the postbox on the wall.  The envelopes, bearing hand-written names and addresses, are invitations to a family Christmas gathering at the village parsonage.  The person posting them turns out to be Jenny (Celia Johnson), daughter of the widowed Reverend Martin Gregory (Ralph Richardson), whose housekeeper she also is.  The early scenes of The Holly and the Ivy introduce their prospective guests with economic clarity.  Martin’s sister-in-law Lydia (Margaret Halstan), a widow living in a London hotel, is relieved to get away from the place for a few days.   A neighbour of Bridget Gregory (Maureen Delany), Martin’s spinster sister, offers to look after her cat while Bridget’s away in Wyndenham.  The parson’s son Michael (Denholm Elliott), currently doing national service in the army, wangles a couple of days’ leave to join the party.  The line-up is completed by Richard Wyndham (Hugh Williams), bon viveur and godfather to Jenny’s younger sister, Margaret, who writes for a fashion magazine in London.  She, too, of course, is invited to the gathering but, unlike the other characters, is conspicuous by her absence from the film’s prologue.  When Richard telephones her at work, he’s told that Miss Gregory is unavailable.  The camera briefly visits a fashion shoot and observes an empty chair, bearing Margaret’s name.

At the parsonage on Christmas Eve, where Jenny is busy with last-minute preparations, we learn about the dilemma she faces and which is at the heart of the story to follow.  She and David Paterson (John Gregson), a young engineer, are in love.  David is starting a new job in South America in a few weeks’ time and wants to take Jenny with him as his wife.  She feels she can’t leave her aging father unless her sister replaces her at the parsonage, and that isn’t going to happen:  Jenny is sure career girl Margaret won’t give up her glamorous professional and social world in London for domestic routine in the sticks.  Once Margaret (Margaret Leighton) belatedly arrives at the parsonage, The Holly and the Ivy starts to explore the strains below the sociable façade of the family reunion and to reveal the recent upheavals in Margaret’s life:  a lover killed in action in World War II; the son they had and whom Margaret raised as an unmarried mother; the little boy’s death, from meningitis, a year ago; her alcoholism.  Until now, she’s kept all these things secret from her father and siblings – a reticence in keeping with what emerges as established family practice, and which is bound up with Martin Gregory’s vocation.   In a showdown between him and Michael, the son angrily demands of his father, ‘How can parsons expect to be told the truth when one can’t even talk to them like ordinary human beings?’  Michael nevertheless takes this opportunity to put the parson in the picture about Margaret, who by now has told the truth to her brother and sister.

This makes for an absorbing drama.  The paterfamilias isn’t an obvious emotional tyrant and George More O’Ferrall gets across without overemphasis how Martin takes Jenny for granted and how dependent he is on her (as Jenny insists to exasperated David).  The Holly and the Ivy is absorbing even in how it evades what it sets up as the key issue in the family dynamic – the idea that Martin is more comfortable looking after his flock than communicating with his children and exploits his clerical authority (how consciously is hard to say) to maintain the status quo.  The parson’s crucial speeches at the climax to the film seem to confirm just what frustrates his children – that he necessarily knows better.  They feel they can’t argue with him, even though two of them, Margaret and Michael, no longer believe in God.  Instead, their reactions, Margaret’s especially, give the impression that the children suddenly realise they’ve always misunderstood their father.  All’s well that ends well.

As so often in a British film of the period, the collection of accents is fascinating but you wonder if some of them were worth the effort.  Celia Johnson, Margaret Leighton, Denholm Elliott and Hugh Williams, as middle-class English characters, can concentrate on the person they’re playing without the distraction of trying to master regional or working-class vowels not their own.  Ralph Richardson isn’t so lucky and seems to waste energy struggling to hold on to a precarious Irish accent.  It’s a shame because the highly educated Martin could credibly have lost his native speech.  (Had he done so that might have made for an effective contrast with his sister Bridget, suggesting the socially different lives they’d led.)  As for John Gregson:  I’d no idea what accent he was attempting until David Paterson mentioned he was Scottish – which isn’t relevant to anything that happens in the story.

On the other hand, Maureen Delany, who really was Irish, demonstrates that ethnic authenticity isn’t enough.  Aunt Bridget sacrificed the possibility of personal happiness by devoting herself to the care of a parent – the fate that now threatens Jenny – but Delany hardly penetrates the character’s surface:  irascible, good-hearted Bridget is rarely more than a Hibernian cliché.  Delany had played the role in the theatre and it shows.  The same goes for Margaret Halstan:  her habit of gazing into the middle distance when Aunt Lydia is thoughtful looks like something she did on stage and she exits scenes as if heading for the wings.  There are nice cameos from Dandy Nichols, as Bridget’s obliging neighbour, and Roland Culver, as Richard Wyndham’s drinking buddy.  William Hartnell rather overdoes Michael’s sergeant major but Robert Flemyng is fine as the senior officer who gives him Christmas leave.

That accent may be to blame but Martin Gregory isn’t Ralph Richardson’s finest hour on screen, right from his first appearance, which is shaky and stagy.  (Martin stumbles into view, worried that he’s overdone his afternoon nap and is late for evening service.)   Thereafter, Richardson registers intermittently but he never seems comfortable in the role.  Celia Johnson has become so strongly identified with Brief Encounter that there’s a tendency to overlook how good she was in other films.  She’s a little too old for Jenny (supposedly thirty-one:  Johnson was in her mid-forties) but there’s nothing else wrong with what she brings to the screen here.  She’s physically very right – she makes Jenny’s domestic busyness a natural part of her – as well as emotionally fine-tuned.  She’s matched by Margaret Leighton, whose delayed arrival on the scene increases its impact and whose brittle chic complements Johnson’s understated centredness.  It’s a dramatic limitation that shocking revelations have to be absorbed too quickly by their recipients:  first Jenny, then her father, once they’ve instantly reacted to news of the child Margaret had and lost, move on instantly, too.  The film also seems in two minds about the cause(s) of Margaret’s alcoholism:  her son’s sudden death might seem reason enough but Jenny thinks the fundamental problem is that her sister is ‘askew with the world’.  But The Holly and the Ivy would be worth seeing just for a sequence in which Jenny is washing and Margaret drying dishes after Christmas Eve dinner.  The emotional shifts and precision of Celia Johnson and Margaret Leighton are thrilling.  It’s great to have discovered these two superb performances.

Anatole de Grunwald, who produced, also did the screenplay, adapted from a play of the same name by Wynyard Browne.  The short Wikipedia article on the film includes a quote from ‘the November 2009 Moviemail Catalogue’, which refers to Browne’s play as a ‘West End stage hit’.  A quick online search hasn’t turned up any more information about the original theatre production but the play was aired on BBC television on 23 December 1951.  Also according to Moviemail Catalogue, the big-screen version ‘now radiates a nostalgic glow’.  This isn’t wrong – a country parsonage, snowfall outside, open fires within, carol singing on the doorstep and in the nearby church – except in specifying ‘now’.  The Holly and the Ivy is proof that nostalgia has been intrinsic to Christmas for a long time.  The film was released in Britain on 22 December 1952.  Its setting’s box-office appeal was evidently expected to trump the regret – in Margaret’s case, the raw misery – that clings to Wynyard Browne’s characters.  Although they’re full of fond recollections of Christmases past, lack or loss of religious belief is a recurring topic of conversation between them.

George More O’Ferrall’s efficient setting up of the story looks leisurely beside its inadvertently comical high-speed conclusion.  As Wikipedia says, ‘All is resolved’, on Christmas morning, in the space of a few screen minutes[1].  Martin and Margaret are miraculously reconciled.  She decides to renounce the London life which, it transpires, she finds a hollow sham.  She’ll move back to Norfolk to live with her father.  Jenny can therefore marry David.  Everyone dashes off to church where the ‘entire family is in harmony … as the morning service begins’.  The happy ending feels like nothing more than the hurried fulfilment of a commercial imperative.  It’s wholly unconvincing – not least because what’s gone before in The Holly and the Ivy has dramatised so much more convincingly the tensions within the Gregory family.

24 December 2020

[1] Although if, as Wikipedia also says,’Michael relents and says he will go to university, as Martin wishes, when he completes his national service’, I missed it.  The last conversation between the two men ends in acrimony, so that Michael’s chipper, relaxed mood in his final appearance, as he asks David to lend him sixpence for the church collection, is puzzling.  Was something cut here, either from the play or the original version of the film?