Cast: Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett, John Mills, Marjorie
Rhodes, and Murray Head
Director: Roy Boulting
115 minutes (15) 1966
Studio Canal DVD Region 2
Rating: 8/10
Review by Andrew Darlington
With
his floppy hair and high-buttoned jacket, Hywel Bennett is perfectly cast in
this movie. Like David Hemmings and Malcolm McDowell, he’s one of those young
actors who seem to embody that particularly strong and distinctive period of
British film-making between the ‘angry young kitchen sink working class’ films
and into the trendy Carnaby Street swinging London era that closely followed.
“Once
upon a time there was a virgin... a rare bird.” The Family Way is not an insurrectionary film igniting the generational
divide, although there are symptoms of it. It’s gentler than that. “Nobody
believes anything nowadays,” complains mom Liz (Avril Angers). It’s not a
subversive angry class-war film either, it has a softer-core centre despite
inhabiting some of the same terrain. More like Stan Barstow’s Vic Brown in A Kind Of Loving (played by Alan Bates
in the 1962 movie), Hywel Bennett’s Arthur Fitton is more the uncertain misfit.
“You read about other people’s lives, what happens? You get to wondering about
your own.” The kind of sensitive youth trapped in working class insensitivity
that I imagined myself to be. Even when – unlike me, this involves the
narrative shorthand of a fondness for classical music, with a Beethoven print
on his bedroom wall, alongside his butterfly collection. “All this sitting and
reading, it’s not natural,” father Ezra (John Mills) complains. “He lives in
the clouds,” agrees friend Joe (Barry Foster).
As
a Bill Naughton stage-play All In Good
Time (1963), it was first brought to the small screen as an ABC weekend TV Armchair Theatre presentation Honeymoon Postponed (1961), with Trevor
Bannister as Arthur, and Lois Daine as Jenny, using the familiar theatrical
device of the wedding to draw characters together, with all the resulting humour
and family revelations that ensue. Naughton later became the creative force
behind Alfie (1966). First, the men
play the arm-wrestling ‘elbow game’ in the front-room, ‘showing off’ father
Ezra’s fiercely competitive nature. Father and son arm-wrestle, but sensing
weakness, Arthur allows Ezra to win. While Jenny (Hayley Mills) looks ‘fab’ in
her wedding dress as comic harpies dispense cynical marital advice over cups of
tea in the kitchen. “Never show pleasure, you know what I mean, don’t you?” “Not
that there ever is much.” “Never actually refuse though, it makes a man feel
small, and they take it out of your housekeeping money,” concludes Molly (Liz
Fraser of ‘Carry On’ fame).
Arthur
fumbles the ring at the ceremony, and drops it – an ominous omen. There are
sausage rolls at the reception as a Beat group plays over raucous innuendo and
brittle family in-fighting. Prior to the honeymoon-proper the couple are to
spend their wedding night upstairs in the Fitton home. But BSA
motorcycle-riding brother Geoff (Murray Head) and film-projectionist friend Joe
sabotage the bed as a prank. The couple have been ‘going steady’, but Arthur’s
a ‘patient lad’ jokes Joe with ribald undertones. Alone at last in the bedroom,
Jenny undresses behind a screen. Arthur watches her enticing underwear drape
across it. But when his attempted romantic approach results in the bed
collapsing, her immediate reaction is laughter. He defensively sees this as
ridicule. When the morning factory sirens howl, he awakes in his dressing gown,
in the chair where he’s spent the night.
They’ve
booked a ‘romantic paradise moonlight special’ in Majorca – at the very
beginning of the package holiday boom, but when they turn up at Hutton’s Happy
Holidays beside the Town Hall fountain they find the police investigating a
swindle. “He’s just done a bunk,” explains Windsor Davies, in a small un-credited
role for the future It Ain’t Half Hot Mum
actor. Symbolic thunder breaks out. So instead, Arthur sits in his chair
looking out over the night terraces, listening to the cats, as Jenny lies in
bed alone. He can correct her Shakespeare misquote – ‘breast’ not ‘beast’, but
he’s “not being a proper husband.”
The
period is perfectly captured. They hear Ezra coughing, and pissing in the
adjoining bedroom’s chamber-pot. And Ezra, who is employed at the local
gasworks, goes to the outside lav with braces dangling. Set in Gladstone
Terrace where Coronation Street-houses and mill chimneys are reluctantly giving
way to new town brutalism, it’s filmed predominantly in Rochdale, with thanks
to ‘the people of Bolton’. And in case we’ve missed the point, there are brass
bands on the soundtrack and the Coronation Street theme heard on the TV.
Yet
the film also forms a unique part of the Mills family dynasty. John Mills, already
an icon of British films, embodied the supposed English virtues of stoicism and
grit as explorer in Scott Of The
Antarctic (1948), and through the understated heroism of war movies The Colditz Story (1954), and Above Us The Waves (1955). Daughter Hayley
became a child star with Whistle Down The
Wind (1961) – adapted from the novel by her mother Mary Hayley Bell, and by
her dual role in Disney’s The Parent Trap
(1961), which also spun-off her only pop hit single Let’s Get Together c/w Cobbler
Cobbler (Decca), a UK #17, November 1961. Inevitably, there were dynastic
career cross-overs. Hayley made her screen debut as witness to a murder that
father John’s police detective was investigating, in Tiger Bay (1959),
following it as ne-er-do-well father Captain Tommy and tom-boy daughter Spring
Tyler in The Truth About Spring
(1965).
Yet
there’s a nuanced ambiguity to his role as Ezra. Beneath the gruff blustering
masculinity there’s an affecting androgyny to his memories of ‘pal’ Billy Stringfellow.
“Always the three of us,” recalls wife Lucy (Marjorie Rhodes) ruefully, even in
their honeymoon B&B. There’s a blunt tenderness to his soliloquy about him
and Billy standing on the edge of the Blackpool beach, wearing “them new brown
boots me and Billy bought” and the tide washing over the leather leaving
glistening droplets of water. “That was the big moment of my honeymoon,” he
sighs with guileless wistfulness. Lucy and Billy even have a subsequent moment
of playful intimacy before he guiltily, or tactfully, disappears south, leaving
both of them with a confused sense of loss. And doubt about Arthur’s true
paternity.
Although
again John and Hayley are predictably cast as father and daughter, The Family
Way forms a significant shift in that the posters announce ‘Hayley Mills isn’t playing
kids games anymore’ and ‘Hey there Hayley girl... you’re in a grown-up movie now’!
And there’s a lingering shot of her – admittedly skinny, bare bottom as Geoff
surprises her bathing in the tin hip-bath in the kitchen. Jenny works in a big
store’s record department, surrounded by time-fixing album sleeves by Nancy
Sinatra, Otis Redding, Francoise Hardy, the Spencer Davis Group, Muddy Waters,
and the Rolling Stones. While Arthur works evenings with Joe as a cinema projectionist,
sneaking a peak at erotic movies. This means that Jenny spends more time with
Geoff, motorcycle scrambling, bowling, and at the disco club-dance. She becomes
his ‘mascot’. “You know something,” he jokes suggestively, “you married the
wrong brother.”
And
after six weeks, the sexual impasse only intensifies. There’s a mail-order
birth-control package, “they’ve come to the wrong address this time, haven’t
they?” he snipes bitterly. There’s a pop art collage of taunting sexual images
– “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” (Matthew XXVI-4), ‘viroids stimulate
strengthen’, and an ad on the bus for The
People newspaper’s ‘sex in marriage’ expose. “What you’ve never had you
never miss,” she tells him, hopefully. Refused a council house in a bureaucratic
comic sequence, Arthur seeks marriage guidance, but cleaner-neighbour Mrs Lee
is listening at the door. Then Jenny confides to mum that she’s “a wife in name
only,” leading to a parental summit conference to discuss skeletons and closets
and the fact that she’s ‘intact, a virgin’.
Born
in Garnant, Carmarthenshire – 8th April 1944, Hywel Bennett found his feet in a
series of engaging television roles, including facing the Dalek menace as
Rynian with William Hartnell’s Doctor Who in The Death Of Time. After graduating to movies, perfectly cast in The Family Way, he starred in three
defining 1960s movies – with Hayley Mills again in psycho-thriller Twisted Nerve (1968), then an earthy
adaptation of Leslie Thomas’ bawdy National Service comedy The Virgin Soldiers (1969), and Joe Orton’s Loot (1970). When it came to swinging London celebrity he and wife
Cathy McGowan were the golden couple. Following his starring role as
penis-transplant recipient Percy
(1971) he returned to TV for a new celebrity lifetime as amiable freelance
layabout ‘Shelley’ in the popular long-running sitcom. He died on the 25th July
2017, leaving an impressive filmography spanning genres.
There’s
a touching The Family Way cameo for
veteran entertainer Wilfred Pickles, as Uncle Fred, who dispenses marital
advice, but by now it’s too late, the state of their unconsummated marriage is
common gossip on busses all around town. Joe cruelly taunts Arthur, until he
breaks and fights back in the cinema car park, beside a Ford Anglia. In their
room he then confronts Jenny, as a crowd of gawping women gather in the back
yards outside (including the wonderful Diana Coupland). They argue, Jenny
smacks Arthur in the face, they collapse onto the bed, struggles become
embraces... and she’s a virgin no more.
Although
he celebrates with a blast of Beethoven’s Fifth, the soundtrack proved another
major movie selling point. The diverse ingredients within the Beatles’ writing
partnership were already becoming apparent, with John Lennon pushing more
towards extreme art-experimentation, while Paul was happy to become catering
composer-on-call for the likes of winsome pop duo Peter & Gordon, or Opportunity Knocks’ songstrel Mary
Hopkin, supplying catchy tunes for the Chris Barber Band (Cat Call), or the Black Dyke Mills Band (Thingumybob), which made movie commissions the obvious next
commercial call. Although George Martin claims he had to badger Paul for the
haunting melodic fragments that became the film motif, Love In The Open Air.
The
Family Way, a euphemism for pregnancy – a ‘bun in the oven’, becomes a touching
and humorous ensemble movie. Raising questions of manhood, gender roles,
changing expectations and the negotiation of sexual transactions. Every
relationship here is flawed in its own stoic damaged fashion. But spiked with
comedic moments, “I won’t have him walking through this house like it were a
public convenience,” complains Ezra, sparking an endlessly repeatable
catch-phrase. Yet it’s redeemed by its humanity. A holiday refund enables a
Blackpool honeymoon. While Ezra stumps up the £200 deposit for a cottage up
Bill Hill, by the reservoir. And it’s John Mills who gets the closing quote. “He
put me in mind of Billy,” he sobs, as Lucy comforts him. “It’s life, lad, it
might make you laugh at your age, but one day, it’ll make you bloody cry...”
