Complete credited cast: | |||
Jack Warner | ... | ||
Kathleen Harrison | ... | ||
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Lana Morris | ... |
Mary
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Charles Victor | ... | |
Thora Hird | ... | ||
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Valerie White | ... |
Mrs. Jarvis
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Harry Fowler | ... |
Sid
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Kate O'Mara | ... |
Annie
(as Merrie Carroll)
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Bernard Fox | ... |
Johnnie
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Margaret St. Barbe West | ... |
Aunt Jean
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Ross Pendleton | ... |
Al
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Leslie Henson | ... |
Uncle Tom
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Sam Kydd | ... |
Albert West
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A man's luck suddenly changes when he wins the football pools.
While with the two leads this resembles The Huggets, it is altogether more ambitious, accomplished and entertaining than any of the Huggets series. It has two sub-plots which are quite interesting but the real heart of it is the ensemble playing of a cast of prime mature comic character actors including Kathleen Harrison, Charles Victor, Thora Hird and Leslie Henson, with Jack Warner absent from the central scene. Films derived from plays have the advantage of being honed over a long period in front of a theatre audience, and it was not difficult to guess that this too had been a play. Each character particularly in the three couples is a very clearly drawn and recognisable type, quite elaborately and amusingly so with the fussy hen-pecked"gess"-addicted Charles Victor (Warner and Victor are workmates at the local gasworks - places, now all gone, which turned coal into domestic gas and once dominated their localities with their smell, soot, gloom and huge looming structures).
The characters, dialogue, situation and locations ring entirely true for a working class family in the 1930's-40s. Whether this amuses later generations is another matter but it is quite good material, expertly played, directed and edited.