TIME GENTLEMEN PLEASE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 819, 7 April 1955, Page 18

TIME GENTLEMEN PLEASE

(Group 3) M phere’ will tell you that no story in contentment, and Little Hayhoe was so much at peace with itself that the local policeman used the lock-up as a spare room for his ‘mother-in-law. But suddenly it attracted attention. Whitehall noticed that it had the remarkably high employment rate of 99.9 per cent, and straightway there was nothing for it but to give the town the full treatment: a visit from the Prime Minister and even, come to that, his P.R.O. From that moment the skids were under its idle point one per cent, a lovable old tramp named Deniel Dance who. divided his time between One of the local haystacks and the local pub. Without hesitation the local council decided he’d have to be kevt decently in the background till the P.M. had come and gone... : Time Gentlemen Please goes on to location at Little Hayhoe, with a bit of American-style newsreel about the place that somehow suggests a good-humoured take-off of Citizen Kane. Its story proper is a little slow getting under way, but once it begins to unwind it’s as ‘suspenseful and as richly comic and heartwarming as you could wish. Take the sequence in which the town is roused after Daniel strikes the jackpot, or any one of his wild sprints across town to beat the curfew. As a tonic, in fact, it’s better than anything Daniel ever put on the slate at The Swan or slipped into the glass of the unsuspecting Miss ("Mata Hari") Mouncey-who (for the record) is the big noise in Little Hayhoe’s weaving industry, and one of th& many locals who, as the story unfolds, take sides for or against the unemployed. Names are.a bore to many people and I hesitate to ‘use too many in this review, giving it an air of solemnity when the film has none. But if you look out for people as I do you will want to know that the story is from R. J. Minney’s novel Nothing to Lose, that Eddie Byrne plays Daniel Dance at the head of an excellent cast, that the spritely music is by Anthony Hopkins, and that the film was directed by Lewis Gilbert and beautifully photographed by Wilkie Cooper for John Grierson’s Group @-a relatively new English unit whose The Brave Don’t Cry, a film as grim as this

one is gay, was seen here a year or two ago. . I hope you will like Time Gentlemen Please for its infectious, fantastic fun, and enjoy as much as I did its agreeable satire. Mr. Grierson says "it is~ "on the simple but civilised idea that maybe someone. somewifere. shouldn’t work’ as hard as they keep on telling us to do. If it said no more than that it would say a mouthful, but in bringing that idea to life it makes fun of all the solemn world for’ harmless, easy-going nonconformity.