Ba-doop-n-doo-de-doo-dah
Doo-doo-de-doo. Be-doodly-do-dah.
I'm watching every film made between about 1930 and 1963. Not all at once, you understand. I'm just going through a phase, which LoveFilm are enabling like the crack-house owners they are.
Today it was "Make Mine Mink" (1960) (doop-do-dooo-oooo-oooo-wah!).
A bunch of oldies (led by Terry-Thomas) start a mink-theft spree, the results going to charity. Hattie Jacques is in full-on Butch mode, and is absolutely corking. Billie Whitelaw is a reformed juvenile delinquent, and her beau is Jack Hedley, who will one day be Senior British Officer Colonel Preston in "Colditz".
Two observations. First, I love caper movies, no matter how bad they are.
Second, it seems that one of the *most* common themes of the films of the 50s and early 60s is just how much everyone misses the war, specifically the sense that everyone was working towards a common goal. You see it in comedies (like "The League of Gentlemen") and more serious dramas (like "The Long Arm"). In this film, it is the explicit motivation for their activities. There's also the palpable sense that the war generation are aging, and that change is in the air (those pesky Beatniks get a newspaper-headline check, for instance).
Quick aside: in further reflection of the changing times, we see a naked (but self-covering) middle-aged woman in a bath. Let me tell you, we don't see that sort of thing in the films of 1955! What is the world coming to?
Things haven't changed that much, though. This is a bunch of single, middle-class, middle-aged characters who are living in a boarding house together. I'm assuming that this feature of Edwardian society carries on through the 1950s owing to the shortage of housing stock post-war; so many films depend on that setting, which is now more-or-less gone (in this middle-class context at any rate).
There is one striking aspect of the plotting, though. They get away with it.
I'm watching every film made between about 1930 and 1963. Not all at once, you understand. I'm just going through a phase, which LoveFilm are enabling like the crack-house owners they are.
Today it was "Make Mine Mink" (1960) (doop-do-dooo-oooo-oooo-wah!).
A bunch of oldies (led by Terry-Thomas) start a mink-theft spree, the results going to charity. Hattie Jacques is in full-on Butch mode, and is absolutely corking. Billie Whitelaw is a reformed juvenile delinquent, and her beau is Jack Hedley, who will one day be Senior British Officer Colonel Preston in "Colditz".
Two observations. First, I love caper movies, no matter how bad they are.
Second, it seems that one of the *most* common themes of the films of the 50s and early 60s is just how much everyone misses the war, specifically the sense that everyone was working towards a common goal. You see it in comedies (like "The League of Gentlemen") and more serious dramas (like "The Long Arm"). In this film, it is the explicit motivation for their activities. There's also the palpable sense that the war generation are aging, and that change is in the air (those pesky Beatniks get a newspaper-headline check, for instance).
Quick aside: in further reflection of the changing times, we see a naked (but self-covering) middle-aged woman in a bath. Let me tell you, we don't see that sort of thing in the films of 1955! What is the world coming to?
Things haven't changed that much, though. This is a bunch of single, middle-class, middle-aged characters who are living in a boarding house together. I'm assuming that this feature of Edwardian society carries on through the 1950s owing to the shortage of housing stock post-war; so many films depend on that setting, which is now more-or-less gone (in this middle-class context at any rate).
There is one striking aspect of the plotting, though. They get away with it.