BRANDY FOR THE PARSON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 822, 29 April 1955, Page 16

BRANDY FOR THE PARSON

| (Group 3) SOFT drink (as we know in A this department) turneth away wrath, and it is perhaps for that reason that I feel vaguely apologetic about the pungent aroma of ardent spirits which hangs over the page this week, and imparts to these normally staid paragraphs something of the heady sparkle of a recipe session. So far as the brandy goes, however, the headiness is somewhat?’ illusory. Brandy for the Parson, a -comedy from John Grierson’s Group 3 | studios, is a pleasant little piece of film fun, but it has been in the keg (or can) for something like three years, and while much of the sparkle remains the lapse of time has brought age without a compensating maturity. Though it is primarily concerned with the old British custom of smuggling, a certain edge was added to the comedy, when the film first appeared in 1952, by the more recent British custom of rationing anything and everything. This no longer strikes home -particularly at 12,000 miles rangebut it is fortunately only part of the fun. More than enough survives the passage of time and the rigours of cold storage to ensure the adult filmgoer a pleasant if not uproarious evening. My principal criticism would be that the film is a little slow in getting under way. James Donald and his fiancée (Joan Lodge) go down to Cornwall for a quiet -_-lC

yachting holiday-pause here for a few time-honoured jokes about British railways, British weather, and _ British phlegm in the endurance of both these tribulations, On their first. trip out Tames’s yacht rams and sinks a smaller vessel because his girl is temporarily. at the wheel, and no. female ever knows port from starboard, anyway. From the welter of wreckage, however, there climbs aboard none other than Kenneth More, and with his arrival on deck the pace begins to build up, and the quality of the comedy to improve. By ceft but thoroughly immoral suasion, Mr. More persuades a reluctant Mr. Donald to help him complete the voyage so abruptly interrupted by the loss of his own vessel. This consists,no less, of dodging across Channel to a French port, lifting a cargo of 14 kegs of choice brandy, and bringing them back to a Cornish creek for transport to London. James Donald's firm resolution-Thus Far and No Farther-is adroitly sapped at each successive stage of the enterprise until we find him and his girl, plus seven ciminutive Shetland ponies, fortuitously purchased from a bankrupt circus, plodding steadily towards London by the old Roman Road while the preventive officers scour the broad highways. Much of the laughter springs from the close shaves the fugitives have in dodging the