Rent Miss Robin Hood (1952)

Good fun; corporate hasn't changed - Miss Robin Hood review by BN

Good natured 1952 film in the Long Lost Comedy Classics series. B&W, 62 mins. Made at Southall Studios.

On-screen instructions are only 3 choices: Play/Stills/ and Also Available - listing others in the series: ORDERS IS ORDERS, TIME GENTLEMEN PLEASE, MAKE ME AN OFFER, THE LOVE MATCH, & JOHN & JULIE

No subtitles.

Another comedic film featuring Richard Hearne before his Mr.Pastry days. He's a meek and mild writer Mr Wrigley who pens the hugely popular 'Miss Robin Hood' series in a comic magazine called Teenager, clearly beloved by all ages. One day he's approached by a Miss Honey, a real eccentric, played by Margaret Rutherford (and honestly, once you see the character who else could ever have played it?) who inveigles him to help her regain the supposedly stolen formula for the secret Macalister Honeycup additive known only to forbidding brewery owner James Robertson Justice.

Lots of funny moments ensue. MR swishes her capes again and wears the strangest dresses whilst presiding over a large houseful of school uniformed & loyal children that I think she's teaching, albeit entirely unconventionally. It's nearly shades of the antics of St Trinians amongst a bunch of pigeons (I think they're doves, as they're all white but hey ho...)

Sid James plays MRs on-tap taxi driver/cum chauffeur who's continually knitting, and other stalwarts appear, like Peter Jones, Kenneth Connor and Reg Varney plus a young Michael Medwin who's romancing Wrigley's daughter Eunice Gayson. Dora Bryan stands behind a pub counter exactly like in an earlier Hearne film, SOMETHING IN THE CITY and remarks

"I never did like a ginger ale drinker."

Even MR's husband Stringer Davis has a tiny bit part. When Wrigley resigns, SD says: "Pity about him, he really can write."

The slightly menacing closeups of the rather ineffectual Scotland Yard inspectors struck a strange note to me in this otherwise fairly whimsical piece with plenty of funny lines. Here are some:

1) Wrigley says to a girl in the lobby with an instrument case, thinking her a fan: "Hello I'm Mr Wrigley."

Girl: (sneering);"Well wriggle off."

2) Lord Otterbourne : "I was nearly lynched."

Menacing 10 yr old: "Don't speak too soon."

3) Mummy: "Sue have you noticed anything odd about Daddy? Daughter: " Not half - he's going bats."

4) Children eagerly procure copies of the latest Teenager comic. Peter Jones has written it in the absence of Wrigley and wants to inject some more highbrow elements which the children read with mounting horror. Cries one: "I want my tanner back!"

5) There's a part which is listed as Small Girl Who Sets Fire to a Comic...and she does!

Some genuinely funny laugh aloud moments, a rather uneven plot and dialogue, some strange camera angles and oddly speeded up sections like when JRJ gets out of his car, but don't let that put you off. Will appeal to children but still fine for adults.

And since 1952 obviously nothing much in the corporate world seems to have changed. Wrigley argues with Lord Otterbourne who's streamlining the paper and dropping the Miss Robin Hood stories: "Business. You think that justifies everything. What do you think you're selling? Trouser buttons?"

"It's the same principle."

"You would say that, that's what happens when anybody like you gets hold of anything, you get fatter & fatter. All you think about is balance sheets, profits and inter office memos. Before you've finished you've killed the very spark that keeps the whole thing running." Hmn.