LONDON BELONGS TO ME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 530, 19 August 1949, Page 19

LONDON BELONGS TO ME

(Rank-Individual) HE initial impression which I got from this Launder and Gilliatt condensation of Norman Collins’s best-selling novel was that in at least one respect it was better than the original-it didn’t take so much time to cover the ground. But (if I can rely on my recollection of the book) it wasn’t precisely the same ground. All the familiar characters are there, and almost all the situations, but the reduction of a long and sometimes rambling story to manageable film proportions has been accompanied by shifts of emphasis which I felt were not altogether accidental. As Norman Collins wrote it (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, as I recall it) London Belongs to Me was the story of little Mr. Josser, a sort of 20th Century Bob Cratchit. It began on Christmas Eve, 1938, with Mr. Josser’s retirement from the firm in which, as a- humble clerk, he had spent most of his working life, and it ended approximately a year later when he returned to carry on in his old job, presumably for the duration of the: war and six months thereafter. Between these two points, the story really belonged to Mr. Josser. True, there was an important secondary plot in the book, involving young Percy Boon who lived in the flat above the Jossers at 10 Dulcimer Street, got involved in the stolen car market, and finally was sentenced to death for murder. There was also the unfortunate Mrs. Vizzard, the widowed landlady of No. 10, who nearly succumbed to the blandishments of the unscrupulous Mr. Squales, a "medium" of doubtful authenticity, but an acute practical psychologist; there was Connie, the night-club attendant, who lived precariously in the third-floor back, and quixotic Uncle Henry who rode round on a bicycle championing lost causes, or causes which he felt gloomily certain were about to be lost. There were, in fact, half a dozen subplots in the book, but the central theme was the simple, uncalculating kindness of Mr. Josser himself, and it was Mr. Josser’s joyful .return to work which in the end brought the tale back fullcircle to its point of origin. In the film, however, the retirement of Mr. Josser is simply, the prologue to the story of Percy Boon, a slight rearrangement of material which gives the studio full scope for the specialised talents of Richard Attenborough. The part of Percy is not such an exacting one as that of Pinky in Brighton Rock (which Attenborough apparently handled with some success), but there are points of resemblance between the two, the milieu is not dissimilar, and certainly Attenborough can play the role of a callow, weak-willed, self-centred young lout in a way to make one’s palms itch. But he does not get a monopoly of one’s attention. As the amoral Mr. Squales, Alastair Sim has the time of his life, Stephen Murray is an almost perfect reproduction of Uncle Henry, and Fay Compton is a convincing Mrs. Josser. ~Wylie Watson is pretty good, too, as Mr. Josser himself, but somehow or other the more eccentric mem-

bers of the cast keep coming between him and the camera. The-casting is, in fact, very well done-as so often is the case in English genre pictures-though I am sure some of the keener followers of the Much-Binding broadcasts will be surprised to encounter Maurice Denham as the sinister spiv Mr. Rufus. The film, in fact, seemed to me better as a collection of character-studies than as a single dramatic unity, and the whole in some way rather less than the sum of the parts.