Terence Young (1959)
The playwright Philip King is best known for his farces – Sailor Beware, Big Bad Mouse (both co-written with Falkland Cary) and, especially, the solo effort See How They Run (1944) – which relies ‘heavily on mistaken identity, doors and vicars’ (Wikipedia). A decade or so after that play was first staged, King wrote a very different piece about a man of the cloth. Serious Charge, after theatre productions in 1955 and 1956, was adapted by Guy Elmes and Mickey Delamar for the screen three years later. The result is an awkward but intriguing concoction.
In a couple of ways, King’s material and Terence Young’s film seem ahead of their time. Serious Charge’s protagonist, a parish priest called Howard Phillips, is (falsely) accused of sexually molesting a nineteen-year-old boy – the locally notorious juvenile delinquent Larry Thompson. Before the incident that sparks the accusations, there’s a sequence where youngsters of both sexes, led by Larry, break into swimming baths late at night to muck around, in and out of the pool, and one of the girls is glimpsed topless[1]. This group of trespassers, though, are part of what’s wrong with the screen version of Serious Charge. As the BFI website says, it’s intent on ‘Aping the US cycle of tearaway teen movies’ and it does so clumsily.
It’s clear enough from online information available about theatre productions of Serious Charge that the stage action all takes place within Howard Phillips’ vicarage and that the play comprises just nine characters. Terence Young and the screenwriters try to open out the material to make it more socially relevant and commercially appealing. By the time the youngsters head off for their midnight swim, there’s already been a sequence in the parish youth club that features frenzied dancing and Revd Phillips (Anthony Quayle) intervening to prevent a knife fight. The turnout at the youth club includes two of the several characters invented for the film: Michelle (Liliane Brousse), a French au pair at the vicarage, who’s got her eye on Larry Thompson (Andrew Ray); and Larry’s younger brother, Curley. He’s played by Cliff Richard, making his big screen debut, which involves singing excerpts from three songs, one of them Lionel Bart’s ‘Living Doll’ (including its now very dodgy lyrics[2]).
Also at the youth club, though not one of the film’s inventions, is Hester Peters (Sarah Churchill, Winston’s daughter), whose father was Howard’s predecessor as vicar. Hester is thirty, unmarried and (therefore) on the shelf. At the youth club, she’s anxious to talk to Howard about the upcoming issue of the parish magazine, but that’s only the start. Not far into the narrative, Hester, no longer able to control herself, throws herself at the vicar, kissing him passionately. As he extricates himself, Howard exclaims, ‘Oh, my dear girl … I’m so sorry’. This compassionate rebuff will have hell-hath-no-fury consequences, when Hester plays a crucial part in supporting Larry Thompson’s claims that Phillips tried to assault him sexually.
BFI’s website also describes Howard Phillips as ‘coded-as-queer’ but I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. On the one hand, Howard is a fortyish bachelor who lives with his mother (Irene Browne). On the other hand, the film goes out of its way to build up his man’s-man credentials. (BFI might still read that as queer coding but they would, wouldn’t they?) Before his new posting in Bellington, the fictional small town where the story takes place (the location filming was done in Stevenage), Howard was a military chaplain in the parachute regiment. He gives boxing coaching to a few of the kids at the youth club. (The boxing ring occupies part of the capacious dance floor there!) Howard’s weekends are very busy because on Saturdays he plays in a football team – presumably as an amateur but apparently in the First Division (ie the top English division: this is decades before the Premier League’s inception). An early scene in a juvenile court, where Howard appears to stand surety for Curley Thompson, ends with the chief magistrate (Wilfred Pickles) mentioning, as Howard leaves the courtroom, his side’s upcoming match ‘against Manchester United, isn’t it?’
It isn’t – it’s against ‘Rovers’ and the vicar’s team is plain ‘United’ – but the match is televised live with Hester glued to the set and thrilled when Howard scores after only two minutes. Neither the boxing element nor the football is followed through to any purpose, though. There’s barely any mention of soccer after the outside broadcast transmission goes on the blink and the screen explains that ‘Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible’. Howard’s sporty side is a minor symptom of Serious Charge’s overplotting to pointless or confusing effect – a tendency that comes through not only in these peripheral details but also in the central story. I don’t know how much this is the legacy of Philip King’s play, how much a consequence of the filmmakers’ efforts to expand his original.
While Howard’s mother is on holiday, Mary Williams (Leigh Madison), the girlfriend Larry has dumped, visits the vicarage in great distress. Howard discovers that she’s pregnant and that Larry is responsible. Howard agrees to talk with Mary’s father, of whom she’s scared, later that evening. While Mary is still at the vicarage, Hester arrives unexpectedly with food for Howard’s supper; Howard tells Mary to slip out by a side door and Hester, waiting on the front doorstep, sees her do so. It’s on this same visit that Howard rejects Hester’s advances. Mary, meanwhile, making her way back home, sees Larry and Michelle snogging in the street; standing transfixed in the dark road, Mary is knocked down by a passing vehicle and killed. Sometime later, Howard, with Mrs Phillips still away and Michelle out of the house, confronts Larry at the vicarage and threatens to reveal that he got Mary pregnant. In response, Larry, faking a struggle scene, smashes ornaments and furniture. As Howard grabs hold to stop him, Larry tears open his shirt, and Hester, back for more, enters the room. The boy tells her the vicar ‘tried to interfere with me’ and rushes out. Howard protests that Larry is lying. Hester immediately replies, ‘Oh no he’s not’.
It would be plausible that spurned Hester, after she sees Mary leaving the vicarage, would cast aspersions about Howard’s relationship with the girl – or even with Michelle but she doesn’t do either. It’s quite a stretch to believe that Hester thinks Howard resisted her because he’s really into boys – or that she would automatically back up the claims of Larry, whom she despises and has previously described as ‘evil’. The accusations against Howard are supposedly given credibility by Hester’s Christian integrity but Bellington’s malicious rumour-mill works overtime chiefly through the efforts of Larry’s irascible father (Percy Herbert) and his thuggish mates. Hester is reluctant at first to talk about what happened. She resigns her extensive parish duties but, according to a local newspaper report of this, refuses to comment further. It’s only when she rails at her father (Noel Howlett) for dictating the direction of her life that she blurts out that seeing Howard with Larry in the vicarage proved to her that the man who fought shy of her embrace would have declined the kisses ‘of any woman alive’. When Revd Peters and Thompson Sr (a very odd couple) subsequently press her to confirm what happened, she says, ‘I can only tell you, father, what I saw with my own eyes’. We never see Hester talk to the local police sergeant (Wensley Pithey), whose uneasy, out-of-uniform conversation with Howard is the closest the latter gets to facing charges, despite the film’s title. Howard is on the receiving end of dirty looks and poison-pen letters, his car tyres are slashed but he’s never subject to formal police interview.
The climax to Serious Charge is bizarre. Howard’s mother eventually returns to the vicarage, learns what’s been going on and talks frankly with Hester. Next thing, Larry arrives at the Peters home, at Hester’s invitation. She has swapped her demure skirts and blouses for a low-cut black dress; is smoking an unprecedented cigarette; has moody music playing in the background; offers her surprised guest a drink. Once all this starts to have the desired effect, she starts trashing the room, just as Larry did, and tears open her dress. The boy is apparently on the point of raping Hester when his father appears in the doorway. That’s the end of the accusations against Howard (and the last seen of Larry). You wonder what on earth the small-minded locals were told by way of explanation of how things got sorted out.
Howard, reasonably dismayed by his treatment, is nevertheless determined to leave Bellington, despite a relay of eleventh-hour callers at the vicarage. The police sergeant and Larry’s father, who both give sheepish apologies, are followed by Hester’s father. Howard means to resign his post with immediate effect and asks Revd Peters to fill in until the bishop appoints a replacement. The old vicar pleads with Howard to reconsider, urging him, on behalf of the townspeople who now regret what’s happened, to ‘forgive and forget’. Hester tries next, also unavailingly, though Howard does acknowledge at the end of their conversation that it’s ‘a terrible pity we didn’t get to know each other earlier’. Howard is nearly packed and ready to go when the juvenile court’s probation officer (Judith Furse), a very large woman in a very small car, turns up with Howard’s ‘unfinished business’, Curley, in the back. Howard is committed to doing all he can for Bellington’s youngsters: he knows he can’t let Curley down and gets in the passenger seat.
Howard winds down the car window, calling out to his mother that he hasn’t changed his mind and she mustn’t start unpacking. He calls out in vain. His regretful remark to Hester a little earlier is the fragile hook on which the film’s remarkable ending hangs a good deal. His mother, who tells Hester, ‘One man against three women – he never had a chance’, seems confident her son will now stay put, more than hopeful that Hester is the woman to take Howard in hand. Sally, aware of the main storyline of Serious Charge beforehand, mentioned at the start that the music accompanying the opening titles was surprisingly chirpy. This music (by Leighton Lucas) is back for the closing scene – as if delivering at last on that assurance on Hester’s television screen: normal service, in romantic terms, has finally been resumed. There’s more forgetting than forgiving going on here.
Yet the finale is fascinating in hints, visual and verbal, about Hester. For the most part, Sarah Churchill’s interpretation of her is competent but rather tiresomely suffering. In her earlier ‘woman to woman’ exchange with his mother, Hester admits her love for Howard and doesn’t disagree with Mrs Phillips’ candid assertion that Hester wanted to sleep with her son. This still doesn’t prepare you for the closing stages. When Larry Thompson grasps her bare shoulders, the look on Sarah Churchill’s face suggests that, while Hester means to expose the boy’s lies, she’s also eager for sex, even with him. Later, Mrs Phillips reminds Howard that Hester saved his bacon – ‘Mind you, she probably enjoyed it … she should do it more often – it suits her’. These moments introduce, at the film’s last gasp, the startling but potentially not unbelievable idea that Hester preferred to think Howard homosexual as her best means of feeling consoled that he wouldn’t belong to another woman rather than her.
That said, the most natural and persuasive relationship in Serious Charge is the one between the vicar and his mother: Howard is a mother’s boy and Mrs Phillips knows it but their mutual attachment is conveyed in a light yet quite sophisticated way. Irene Browne, supplying what little humour the film has, seems very right in the role. The least satisfying character is Larry. The sequences in the youth club and the coffee bar where the kids also gather, are strenuous attempts to show them as a new generation less inhibited than their elders. They mostly come across as too bourgeois (and middle-aged) for this to work; besides, their slangy dialogue might have been written by a vicar cluelessly trying-to-get-on-the-kids’-wavelength. Andrew Ray is the chief problem, though. He wasn’t by any means a bad actor but whoever cast him as Larry must have thought Ray much more versatile than he was. There’s not a dangerous bone in his body; his efforts to work menace into his voice instead render Larry still more weedy and unconvincing. Readers of reviews on this website of The Queen’s Guards (1961) and Telstar: The Joe Meek Story (2008) will know my opinion of Jess Conrad the celebrity but he could act. In his small, nearly wordless role here, Conrad has an uncouth presence entirely lacking in Andrew Ray.
Cliff Richard, for whom Expresso Bongo was just round the corner, is understandably uncertain but he gets by. The character of Curley doesn’t make much sense: it’s unclear what he did wrong to land him in juvenile court in the first place; in all that follows, Curley seems well behaved and law-abiding (he doesn’t even join the naughty outing to the swimming baths). Cliff Richard is comfortable only when he sings, relaxing into an impression of himself in his early stage or television studio appearances. Saving the best to last: the quality of the film’s lead performance shouldn’t be underestimated. Whatever Howard Phillips does or says – and there’s plenty of both – he’s always credible. (The soccer-playing Howard on the telly is obviously an actual footballer, not the vicar, by the way.) Anthony Quayle is excellent.
3 July 2025
[1] According to Wikipedia’s article on the film, ‘The scene at the lido was captured in three distinct versions. Harrison Marks model Jean Sporle appeared topless for the French market. In the second, she sported a bikini, catering to UK tastes. The third had her donning a petticoat for the US market’. I watched Serious Charge on Amazon Prime Video, which must be using the French version.
[2] ‘I’m gonna lock her up in a trunk so no big hunk/Can steal her away from me’
