Charles Crichton (1947)

Hue and Cry is regarded as the first Ealing comedy and the trademark smug humour of the series is there from the opening credits, which appear on a brick wall as if scrawled there by kids.  The graffiti (although the effect is too quaint and artful for that to seem the right word) build to a jocose climax – ‘Wot No Producer’ (it was Michael Balcon) and ‘King Charles Crichton’.  This introduction sets the picture in a particular time and film-making culture.  The shooting on location in bomb-damaged London dates Hue and Cry in a more positive way, as a record of the city’s appearance just a year after the end of World War II.  That may not have been what Balcon, Crichton and T E B Clarke, who did the screenplay, had it primarily in mind to do but the film is better when it isn’t trying – or isn’t seeming to try – for an effect.  As with Passport to Pimlico, Clarke’s idea is ingenious:  teenager Joe Kirby is a fanatical reader of the crime serial in his boys’ weekly – he starts to find words and pictures on the pages of the comic materialising in the real world.  Joe and his pals defy the scepticism of the police and use their own resources to foil a gang of crooks who are using the comic’s pages to transmit secret information to each other.

There are nice moments when the kids interact naturally; a bit with a young boy doing impressions of a bomb explosion and a machine gun is truly eccentric, both visually and sonically.  Harry Fowler is likeable and works hard as Joe; Joan Dowling, to whom Fowler was briefly married before her suicide, at the age of twenty-six, in 1954, is the one, tomboyish girl allowed in the boys’ gang.  It’s to Fowler and Dowling’s credit that the strain of playing kids several years younger than they actually were doesn’t show.  Alastair Sim’s eccentricity keeps him going as the thoroughly dubious Felix H Wilkinson and I liked Frederick Piper as Joe’s father but some of the other grown-ups, notably Jack Warner as Joe’s boss in Covent Garden, are harder to take.  As Joe’s sister, Heather Delaine is an inexplicably posh voice in the working-class Kirby household.   (Vida Hope is the mother.)   Pride in salt-of-the-earth Englishness in the aftermath of the war that had just been won was understandable, to say the least, and the pitting of the kids’ imagination and common sense against the dim-witted forces of authority should be amusing – but the self-conscious drollery of Hue and Cry makes the film tiresome.  The score seems meant to reinforce the deliberately whimsical tone of Charles Crichton’s storytelling – and much of it does – but it’s unmistakeably Georges Auric and that neurotic edge to the music is welcome.

16 September 2013