David Lean (1954)

Harold Brighouse’s popular and durable four-act comedy, set in Salford in the 1880s and first staged in 1916, isn’t dramatically sophisticated and its characters are not subtly drawn.  It’s soon clear how things will turn out and, in David Lean’s film adaptation (he also wrote the screenplay), the final act feels a bit long-winded.  (This is partly the result of the preceding scene, in which the hero Willie Mossop’s nervous preparations for his wedding night are painstakingly described.  The sequence concludes on such a humorously triumphant note that you wonder for a moment if this might be the end of the whole film.)   But Hobson’s Choice is richly enjoyable, a minor eccentric classic.  Even with the two successful Dickens pictures already behind him, it now seems surprising – in view of what he went on to do – that Lean was drawn to a character-driven, largely indoors piece but he and his cinematographer, Jack Hildyard, make the material visually lively and interesting in all sorts of ways.  They do so right from the opening shot of the outside of bootseller Henry Hobson’s shop.  A great, black sample of Hobson’s wares hangs implacably above the door (and creaks in the wind).  Willie Mossop and Henry’s eldest daughter, Maggie, the first time they walk out together, sit on a bench overlooking a largely industrial landscape the extent of which contrasts startlingly with the cramped interiors of Hobson’s parlour, Willie’s lodgings and the snug at the Moonrakers pub, where Henry spends plenty of his time.  His blotto journey back from there late one night is a justly famous and funny sequence.  The full moon reflected in puddles on the dark cobbles is, in every sense, a highlight of his drunken hallucinations, which begin in the pub and continue into the grim morning after.  Lean and Hildyard also take full advantage of the distinctive physique and gait of the actors, especially Charles Laughton as Hobson and John Mills as Willie.

All three principals are splendid:  Laughton is outstanding but Mills and Brenda de Banzie as Maggie are very fine too.  The clumsily tyrannical paterfamilias Henry Hobson doesn’t want any of his three daughters to marry because he’s better off, financially and personally, with them all working for him in the shop and in the family home behind it.  Laughton’s performance is essentially a theatrical turn but it’s full of wonderful histrionic invention; one of the strengths of all three characterisations is in how the actors combine comedy with reminders of the things that really matter to the people they’re playing.  Hobson is infuriating when, with his mason friends in the Moonrakers, he makes fun of Maggie and Willie but getting his own way is a deadly serious matter to this egocentric monster.  In the final part of the story, when he’s ailing and needs the now married Maggie and her new husband Willie to move back home, Hobson’s gorge keeps rising – in fury that he is forced to bargain with the man who used to be the shop’s boothand and with the daughter he ridiculed as an old maid.  The determination shown by Brenda de Banzie’s Maggie to land Willie is founded on anxiety that she is indeed on the verge of being unmarriageable – she makes the gradually blooming relationship between Maggie and Willie oddly affecting.  (Maggie is meant to be thirty but it’s right that Brenda de Banzie, who was in her mid-forties at the time, looks older.)  The real surprise here is John Mills.  Of course he has to work harder than Charles Laughton to be physically extraordinary but he succeeds.  Mills shows plenty of comic flair and imagination while remaining in character.  (He too was in his mid-forties when the film was made but his pint-size underdog quality makes him seem younger.)   The awkward, deeply unassuming Willie Mossop is the unsung craftsman of Hobson’s enterprise – a wealthy customer, Mrs Hepworth, recognises him as ‘the best bootmaker in Lancashire’ but Willie, at the start, can’t read or write.  Thanks to Maggie’s persistent instruction, he learns not only to do both but also to stand up for himself to the extent of disagreeing with his wife – in the final negotations with her father, about the future name of a business partnership between the two men.  Willie insists it must be ‘Mossop and Hobson’:  he gets his way then apologises to Maggie for standing his ground so firmly.  She, of course, is eventually delighted that he did.

A host of cherishable character actors fill the smaller parts.  Hobson’s two other daughters, Alice and Vicky, are played by Daphne Anderson and a very young Prunella Scales; their respective suitors are Richard Wattis and Derek Blomfield.  Raymond Huntley is the latter’s temperance zealot father and John Laurie is Hobson’s no-nonsense doctor.  Helen Haye is Mrs Hepworth, who lends Willie and Maggie the funds to start up their own effectively (in both senses) rival business.  Jack Howarth (Albert Tatlock in Coronation Street) plays another of Hobson’s employees and  Dorothy Gordon Ada Figgis, the daughter of the woman with whom Willie lodges.  Ada is Willie’s intended until Maggie stakes her claim, to the chagrin of Madge Brindley’s scary Mrs Figgis.  The other fixtures in the Moonrakers include Gibb McLaughlin, Julien Mitchell, Philip Stainton and Joseph Tomelty.  Malcolm Arnold’s music is, in a sense, unnecessarily bold underlining of the humour but, like the film as a whole, it comes across as likeably apt and ingenious.

26 May 2014