Rent Ha'penny Breeze (1950)

Watching The River flow - Ha'penny Breeze review by CH

Ha'Penny Breeze (1950) is not as well known as Ealing Studios' films, but this depiction of post-war life beside the River Orwell has much in common with them. Directed by Frank Worth, it is from a story which he wrote with Don Sharp, who also stars in it as an Australian who had been in a prisoner-of-war camp and is invited by Edwin Richfield to his home village of Pin Mill.

The film opens with their walking, kit-bags in hand, up a quiet lane. All of which is very pastoral, but reality intrudes with a turn of the corner and their finding the small shipbuilding yard in disrepair. The place is bleak. Richfield's family come in sight to explain what has happened. The mood is sombre, even despairing but, having got this far, Richfield is not one to be daunted. He proposes they continue to build the yacht on which he had worked before the war and use it as a means to bring purchasers for more of them: a new world beckons. Such a notion runs up against objections from the old guard who look askance at such pleasure-seeking notions.

Into all this comes a familiar cast: a vicar, a genial publican a beautiful young woman – and a bounder intent upon scuppering the race for which the yacht is eventually entered (Darcy Conyers, who also produced the film). Put like this, it might sound whimsical but its strength owes much to the cinematography by Gordon Lang and George Stretton. Buildings and landscape (including the river) are made as much characters as those who act out their destiny in the foreground. There is something almost Expressionist about the way in which a single head fills the screen in profile each time events take dramatic turns.