Well, I hate to say it, but we finally got a bad one, which just goes to show that even the great John Mills can have a clunker. It feels lousy to criticize a movie that was offered as a comic uplift, to boost wartime morale, but I have to be honest - "Old Bill and Son"(1941) was a chore to sit through. Accordingly, I'm not going to expend a lot of effort describing it to you, but I will give you the basic premise and a plot point or two.
As the movie opens, Mills meets his father on a busy London street. Dad's a cab driver with a broken old wreck; JM's an unemployed Dandy, dressed to the nines with a cocky attitude. They are Old Bill and Son. Old Bill is worn out but tough. He's seen real life as a veteran of WW1. Mills (the son) is young and "knows it all" as only a young man can. He thinks he's got life by the tail, but still needs to borrow money from dear old Dad and isn't shy about asking. All of this is a screenwriter's trick to set father and son at comedic odds with one another.
Then WW2 breaks out and they both want to sign up. This puts them on the same team, well sort of, because they still want to upstage each other. Mills enlists right away. It takes Dad a little longer because at first the Army says he's too old. Eventually he gets in as a cook.
It's a propaganda film presented as a screwball comedy, which is fine because England needed the mood lifter and to generate public support for the war. But the director allows the hijinx to run on unabated. At 99 minutes, the film's a half hour too long, and there's no attempt to reign in scenes of slapstick that go on forever. There also isn't a plot to speak of besides Old Bill and Son joining the Army, followed by the enlistment of Bill's daughter and eventually his wife. This is to show that everyone was important in the war effort, which is what the movie is really about. But there have been other propaganda movies out of England and the US that got the same message across in a well made picture. "Old Bill and Son" feels like a jumble of scenes that were thrown together, and boy does it tax one's patience.
Ironically, it ends with a nice flourish. There's a "punch line" having to do with the theme of father/son one upsmanship, and had the filmmakers shown the same focus with the rest of the movie, they might've had a winner. As it was, I was struggling to stay awake. According to IMDB, John Mills didn't like it either, and was dismissive of "Old Bill and Son" in his autobiography. I'm afraid I can't give it a recommendation, but I'll award it a Single Thumb for good intentions and for it's ending. It's a shame because there are funny moments and mile-a-minute Britspeak jokes. A film of just over 60 minutes would've worked. ///
Much better was "The History of Mr. Polly"(1949), the other of the two Mills Films I dug up, which we watched the previous night. Based on a book by H.G. Wells, it tells the story of an aimless man who wanders his way through life and thus has happenstance decide his fate. When we first see Mr. Polly (Mills), he's being sacked from his job for slacking. Then his Dad passes away and leaves him a modest sum, which he's advised to invest. "A shop's the thing, Alfred", a relative tell's him. "It's a bit of work, but in the long term it'll make your money grow". The problem is that Alfred Polly doesn't want to work, not in a shop anyway. It's the very kind of business he was fired from.
So the first thing he does is buy a bicycle. Now he can ride around and explore. It's his favorite pastime next to reading. Mr. Polly is a creature of imagination, a daydreamer who goes where the day takes him. While out biking, he meets a young girl (Sally Ann Howes) sitting on a wall in the country. They converse, he tells her she's the most beautiful creature he's ever seen, and she agrees to meet him there again the next day. I won't tell you what comes of this, or rather the way in which it ends, but suffice it to say that Mr. Polly ends up disillusioned, and goes to the house of his Aunt, who has three chirruping daughters. Though he'd been repulsed by these women at his father's funeral, he turns to them now for consolation. They all talk a blue streak, but have a way about them that extinguishes melancholy.
Polly ends up marrying one of the sisters and, against his better judgement, spends the rest of his inheritance on a shop, just like the one he used to work at. He does this mainly to appease his relatives, who are wondering how he'll support a wife. Of course, he eventually comes to hate owning a business because it takes all his time, which he'd prefer to spend reading, biking or daydreaming. His wife nags at him about money until he winds up hating her too, and one day something happens at his shop that will cause a complete change in his life, a change that will lead him to happiness. But he'll ultimately have to fight to keep it, and this of course is the moral of the story : i.e. freedom is never free, etc.
"The History of Mr. Polly" has the spirit of a fable, like "Forrest Gump" (for want of a better example). Polly is at heart an innocent, though not to the extent of Gump, and yet he's not cut out for the 9 to 5 world of everyday life. Mills plays him as a fantasy character, ala Peter Pan, and the creative "slanguage" that results from his butchery of English, flows off his tongue as if he were a natural speaker. The England of Mr. Polly's world is also like a fantasy, one of thatched cottages, country lanes and overflowing gardens.
We noted above that "Old Bill and Son" was not one of John Mills' favorites. The opposite was true of "The History of Mr. Polly", which he regarded as his best work. It has the appeal of a timeless classic, one that bears repeat viewings, and I agree with Mister M, it's a great film. Two Huge Thumbs Up, then, and we'll call it a must see.
So there you have it : two ends of the John Mills spectrum, one not so good and one most excellent. At the moment I am all out of John Mills movies, but we won't call an official end to our JM retrospective just yet. Allow me to make another search this evening, and if I can't find anything new we'll move on, but until then, Mills lives!
That's all for now. Have a great evening, and tons of love as always! xoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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