CASTLE IN THE AIR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 736, 21 August 1953, Page 19

CASTLE IN THE AIR

(Associated British) HE impoverished state. -of the British aristocracy these days is the’ subject of some merry spoofing in this English comedy, based on a play by Alan Melville. The story concerns the ingenious endeavours of the handsome but penniless young Earl of Locharne to sell his ancestral home to an American millionairess, and at the same time save it from being requisitioned by an officer of the Coal Board. who wants to turn it into a hostel for miners. Locharne Castle, situated a few miles from Aberdeen, is an old pile with an overgrown moat and walls that are held together only by the ivy. The Earl (played by David Tomlinson) tries to maintain it (and himself) by taking in boarders. He also shows parties of tourists around the rooms with their family portraits, suits of armour, and, in one of them, an attractiye ghost named Ermyntrude (Patricia) Dainton) who appears at moments of crisis to frighten away unwelcome visitors or open the doors for late-arriving guests. Among the visitors are the millionairess (Barbara Kelly), an attractive but financially shrewd blonde, and the agent of the Coal Board, a socialist civil servant (Brian Oulton) who believes that all aristocrats are decadent as well as poor. Among the "guests," as the Ear!’s lodgers are euphemistically called, are an elderly lady who hasn’t spoken a word since her parrot died, and a matronly historian (Margaret Rutherford) who is determined to prove that the Earl is "the ‘rightful king of Scotland" from a study of his genealogical tree, The somewhat. hilarious" goings-on which the imperturbable Earl instigates within the castle walls are maintained at a fast pace throughout the picture. A grouse shoot on the moors, an afternoon of salmon poaching, a high-spirited meeting of the Jacobite society, and an amusing dinner in the banqueting hall with a kilted servant playing bagpipes on the balcony are some of the incidents introduced to keep the comedy from flagging. In the end the Earl succeeds in thwarting the Coal Board official and persuades the millionairess to sign a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars. He is then free to. propose marriage to his pretty house manageress (Helen ‘Cherry) and buy a couple of tickets for Cuba, where he will presumably live among the flesh-pots and forget he ever owned a castle. There is a rather heartless flavour about this comedy, and the portrait of the socialist civil servant is savagely satirical. But all the players act their parts with faultless. aplomb, and the contrivances of the plot are neatly concealed by the film’s director, Henry Cass.