Rent Boys in Brown (1949)

The Lesser Escape - Boys in Brown review by CH

Before his film career began, Dirk Bogarde appeared on stage. Boys in Brown (1949) gives one a glimpse of that - after a fashion. He is one of a group of young men joined in Borstal by well-meaning but weak Knowles (Richard Attenborough) who is invidiously persuaded against his better judgment to join in a pointless break-out. Part of their cover is a production of a scene from Julius Caesar which is shown in gym-room rehearsal and upon the stage - where the Ides echo to Bogarde's reasonable attempt at a Welsh accent (which makes one wonder how Shakespeare sounds with an all-Welsh cast).

Written and directed by Montgomery Tully, who soon became a prolific director of B-movies, this is in something of the manner of those made by Basil Dearden who treated social issues in a liberal, sometimes wooden manner. Here is a Governor (Jack Warner) who is at pains to emphasise that he has his charges' best interests at heart but, when trying to inspire them to look ahead, finds himself forever up against spirits soured by upbringing and experience (there is an interestingly brief sub-plot - potentially a film in itself - about his attempt to persuade a now well-married, clip-voiced woman, with a child glimpsed upon a garden swing, to give a home to a son whom she last glimpsed as an illegitimate infant sent out for what proved to be drunken fostering).

Well-filmed, whether in close up (the inevitable telephone) or long shots of the prisonesque establishment, with some fine night-time moments when a raid upon a wardrobe goes horribly wrong (watch it to see what that phrase means), here are eighty minutes which transcend their origins as a play (which had also been shown on television). Other well-known figures provide a turn, including a brief one by Thora Hird as Attenborough's mother - and one of the opening moments' hoodlums who landed getaway driver Attenborough in it was... Clive Dunn, he of that number-one song “Grandpa” which should have brought him, the children's chorus and all who purchased it a long stretch with no remission.