LAXDALE HALL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 870, 6 April 1956, Page 20

LAXDALE HALL

(Group 3-A.B.F.D.) NEVER taught my gfandmother to Suck eggs (I’m sure the dear old soul would have been quite taken aback if I had even broached the subject), and I have usually felt similarly diffident about telling film exhibitors how to run their affairs. But that has not prevented me feeling exasperated at the way in which some worthwhile films are allowed to drift around from one minor moviehouse to another when a little elementary promotion would ensure them a profitable run on Main Street. It’s no time since I was making this complaint about Fanfan the T ulip (Listener, Match 23). Now I have to make it again about Laxdale Hall, which had a record run at an Auckland suburban house near the end of last year and is now getting the suburban treatment in Wellington. If it should come to your neighbourhood cinema, and if you are not averse to a little Highland fun and games, don’t let an unpromising title put you off. I would ever suggést that, other things being unequal (as they not infrequently are for filmgoers) it is worth a trip across the frontier into a neighbouring suburb. Laxdale Hall, which was adapted from Efic Linklater’s novel by Alfred Shaughneéssy and John.Eldridge (and directed by Eldridge), is admittedly not quite in the same class a8 Whisky Galore ot The Maggie, bit thete is enough tesémblance to reinforce its own fun with other hilatious recollections. Laxdale is a small clachah on the séa coast of the Western Highlands, where everyone lives

the simple life very happily and no one except the district midwife works unduly hard. But though easy-going, the inhabitants are not to be put upon, and when the five local motorists refuse to pay their Road Fund licences (on the score that they haven’t a road worth the name to drive on), it causes a mild flutter in Whitehall. A Parliamentary delegation with Raymond Hufitley as its self-satis-fied leader, is sent to deal with this outbreak of anarchy, and it is the far from quiet weekend of their stay in Laxdale that forms the subject of the film. The unfortunate Mr, Pettigrew, M.P., hasn’t a chance against the simple Highlanders. He gets drenched to the skin at an alfresco performance of Macbeth, put on for his benefit in the middle of a typically Highland rainstotm, he is made the target of a firé-and-brimstone sermon, and in the end, itretrievably compromises himself by getting arrested in the compafy of a band of salmon-poachers ftom Glasgow. Laxdale Hall is, in short, good clean fun. Even if the background hadn’t looked authentic, the quality of the weather would suggest that it was filmed in the highlands. In general, too, the accents are good, the players (notably Raymond Huntley and Ronald Squire) are at the top of their form, and when allowance is made for the mild carica(continued on next page)