Displaying items by tag: Pamela Brown

NOW AND FOREVER

UK, 1956, 90 minutes, Colour.

Janette Scott, Vernon Gray, Kay Walsh, Jack Warner, Pamela Brown, Charles Victor, Marjorie Rhodes, Ronald Squire, Wilfred Lawson, Sonia Dresdel, David Kossoff, Moultrie Kelsall, Guy Middleton, Michael Pertwee, Bryan Forbes, Thora Hird.

Directed by Mario Zampi.

Not a well-known British film from the mid-1950s – a young romance, and in colour.

It is a star vehicle for Janette Scott who was to appear in a number of British films in the coming decade, and she appears with her actress mother, Thora Hird, as the family cook. Her co-star is the Canadian Vernon Gray, who made only a few films.

What will be of interest to audiences who like watching the British films of the 1950s, generally small, local issues… Will be very interested in the range of the supporting cast, Kay Walsh is the school headmistress, Jack Warner not a policeman this time but the owner of a garage, father of the character played by Vernon Gray. Pamela Brown is the young girl’s severe mother, Pamela Brown expert at this kind of superior disdainful kind of character. There is Charles Victor a sympathetic, and Marjorie Rhodes his unsympathetic wife, Sonia Dresdel as one of the schoolteachers, David Kossoff in a small role as a pawnbroker, Guy Middleton as the mother’s boyfriend, and Ronald Squire as an eyebrow-raising waiter in a cafe.

The film was directed by Mario Zampi, an Italian who set up the company in London. His best-known films are Laughter in Paradise, with Alistair Sim, and Too Many Crooks.

The story is the familiar one that would be treated in a much more open, even permissive way in the 21^st-century. The 18-year-old daughter lives with her mother, a severe socialite, but loves her father who has been divorced from her mother. Then the news that he dies. She encounters the son of the local garage mechanic, her mother hiring him for drives. They are attracted to each other, he driving her to school, her mother disapproving, his father more tolerant, then all kinds of ups and downs, her mother wanting to send her to Canada, her feeling suicidal, the help of the headmistress, the plan to elope with the young man, the police after them, various escapades, and their being caught on the Scottish border, the young man’s father being kindly, trying to persuade her mother to some kind of compassion.

All very familiar – but with a 1950s kind of propriety and reticence.