Here’s one last Christmas movie review for the season. It’s a small British film from 1952 with Ralph Richardson cast as Reverend Martin Gregory, a parson in a small Norfolk village. He is recently widowered and lives with his older daughter Jenny. His younger daughter Margaret lives in London working as a fashion journalist and his son Michael is in the British Army. Jenny is in love with an engineer named David Paterson but David has a job offer that would send him to South America for five years. But Jenny says she cannot leave her aging father alone and refuses to even tell him about her love because then he would sacrifice his needs for the sake of her happiness.
The siblings will be returning home for Christmas along with two elderly aunts and a friend of the family. The drama turns on the tensions arising out of the grown children’s fears about what they believe are their father’s intolerant religious principles. The younger daughter lives in London to hide the existence of her illegitimate child from her whole family so that they wouldn’t be burdened with hiding this secret from their father.
During the course of the Christmas visit all these secrets come out and Martin realizes that his manner has made him unapproachable to his children thereby isolating and harming them. He has frank discussions with his visiting son and daughter and does his best to convince them that he is not an inhuman religious fanatic but a man who loves his children and is not unrealistic about his expectations for human beings and their problems. And once the secrets are exposed a resolution of the practical problem of Martin’s household needs is very satisfactorily found.
Ralph Richardson’s Martin is quite moving in his portrayal of a man struggling to connect with his children through the distance that his station in life has created. He shows compassion and humility when his children relate the tragedies that have plagued them and he defends the life affirming nature of his faith and rejects the idea that he has not faced similar problems in his life. He shows himself a warm human being and dispels the illusion that he has allowed his children to build of him as some kind of caricature of an Old Testament prophet summoning down lightning on the heads of his erring descendants.
All the actors perform admirably including the more ancillary characters like David, the aunts and the family friend. The script is warm and intelligent and the plot plays out in a streamlined eighty minutes. In fact, I could have wished it had been a little longer. As opposed to the bleak cinema that Britain produced in the 1960s this movie, based on a play by Wynyard Browne, is life-affirming and ultimately optimistic. Highly recommended for Christmas time but really enjoyable at any time of the year.
