Customer Reviews

Hue and Cry [VHS]

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In the reduced list of the most relevant films of U.K. made in the late forties, this is one of the top ones. A meek detective story writer and a group of kids crack a gang of thieves. This was the same team who eventually made "The lavender hill mob."

Hue and Cry is considered the first of the Ealing comedies, a string of very funny British films put out by Ealing from the late Forties to the mid-Fifties.

Joe (Harry Fowler), a London East End kid, is addicted to a boy's adventure weekly called The Trump. He begins to suspect that a series of burglaries somehow are related to the weekly storyline...that there are hidden messages in the story that tell gang members the place and time of the next store to be hit. Harry convinces the other boys in the neighborhood and they go to the cops. When the police don't believe them, they set out on their own to stop the gang and capture the ringleader. Along the way they find themselves trying to stop a burglary in a department store, getting noticed by Jim Nightingale, a tough greengrocer (Jack Warner), kidnapping a luscious blond secretary who may know more than she lets on, and trying to deal with Felix H. Wilkinson (Alastair Sim), the eccentric writer of the The Trump's storyline, a man with a distaste for small boys. The film's climax is the wonderful Battle of Ballards Wharf, where it seems every kid in London shows up to confront the bad guys.

The film was shot in 1947, most of it on location, and piles of brick and rubble from WWII bombing are much in evidence. Alastair Sim gives a typically batty, funny performance, but the star really is Harry Fowler. He's completely believable as a Cockney kid outraged that crooks would use The Trump for their criminal purposes. This is a funny, good-hearted movie, very much of its time and place.

A wonderful film for young and old. The heroes are a group of boys, and one girl who mixes it up with the best of them: post-WWII Baker-Street Irregulars. There's intrigue and suspense, and Alastair Sim at his comic best as a timid writer of tabloid adventure thrillers.
How sad that this film is not available on a Region 1 dvd! But if you have a multi-region dvd player, you can order it from Amazon.co.uk for £9.03, including shipping (about $18.00 as of this writing).