Product description

Hue And Cry [1947]

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Average customer rating: 4.0

Binding : DVD
EAN : 5060034577430
Label : Optimum Home Entertainment
Manufacturer : Optimum Home Entertainment
Publisher : Optimum Home Entertainment
Release date : 2006-11-13
Title : Hue And Cry [1947]
Actor : Array
Audience rating : Universal, suitable for all
Format : PAL
Languages : Array
Number of items : 1
Original release date : 1947-02
Region code : 2
Running time : 78
Studio : Optimum Home Entertainment
Theatrical releaseDate : 1948

Customer reviews

review by: date: 2008-11-22 rating:

Pure Ealing magic
Full marks for another Ealing classic. Brilliant child actors, combined with a terrific plot, this is film to watch again and again. Although a comedy, some of the fight scenes between the children and the villans looked very realistic (and quite violent!)

review by: date: 2007-09-24 rating:

A Gem of a Film

One of the early Ealing comedies set in post-war London, so there's a lot of bomb sites and rubble! A young man (Harry Fowler) is looking for a job - a weekly children's comic (The Trump) comes his way and he begins to notice that some of the comic's contents are accurate (for example he sees a car in the comic that has the same registration number as a car he spots in the street). In checking up further he and some of his chums become convinced that the comic is being used by crooks to send coded messages to each other about potential robberies. The kids seek out The Trump's author (a wonderful cameo from Alastair Sim) to check whether his original stories have been changed. The action takes off from there! This is a lovely little film, with a good cast and a clever storyline.

review by: date: 2007-06-27 rating:

Amusing, Wry And Endearing
Hue and Cry is considered the first of the Ealing comedies, a string of very funny British films put out by Ealing from the late Forties to the mid-Fifties.

Joe (Harry Fowler), a London East End kid, is addicted to a boy's adventure weekly called The Trump. He begins to suspect that a series of burglaries somehow are related to the weekly storyline...that there are hidden messages in the story that tell gang members the place and time of the next store to be hit. Harry convinces the other boys in the neighborhood and they go to the cops. When the police don't believe them, they set out on their own to stop the gang and capture the ringleader. Along the way they find themselves trying to stop a burglary in a department store, getting noticed by Jim Nightingale, a tough greengrocer (Jack Warner), kidnapping a luscious blond secretary who may know more than she lets on, and trying to deal with Felix H. Wilkinson (Alastair Sim), the eccentric writer of the The Trump's storyline, a man with a distaste for small boys. The film's climax is the wonderful Battle of Ballards Wharf, where it seems every kid in London shows up to confront the bad guys.

The film was shot in 1947, most of it on location, and piles of brick and rubble from WWII bombing are much in evidence. Alastair Sim gives a typically batty, funny performance, but the star really is Harry Fowler. He's completely believable as a Cockney kid outraged that crooks would use The Trump for their criminal purposes. This is a funny, good-hearted movie, very much of its time and place.

review by: savvy date: 2005-07-13 rating:

'Hue and Cry' (1947) MR Alistair Sim and ealing comedies
Hue and Cry (1947) the first Ealing comedy with a cameo by A.S..is a delight made on location in the bomb sites of London, the city and covent garden
so historically fascinating.
like all movies with Alistair Sim it is 'exquisite' to watch..no other word than that for the delight in him and watching over and over again..
a dvd you must have in a collection of brilliant Ealing films.

At last Mr Sim is transferred to dvd..
'Green Man', 'An Inspector Calls' etc.... more please ?:-)

review by: date: 2005-01-18 rating:
A good film, a rather poor DVD
The review contains no plot spoilers.

A little gem. Although this is pitched as "the first of the Ealing Comedies", there are few outright laughs and it's perhaps better to approach this a thriller made for children. The imagery of British neo-romanticism is strong here: nature & children reclaiming the bomb-sites along the Thames; the sense of "another world" alongside the normal (secret codes, the sewers, children's street culture, the deserted moonlit streets; and the sense that history has been embodied in the landscape of the river and docklands itself). There are also some uncanny & unexplained touches, that serve to express how these children must have been influenced by growing up during the war; one child with an uncanny voice seems to be able to create real wartime sounds many times larger than himself. Or perhaps it's just the echoes in the bombed out buildings; the viewer is left to decide.

Sadly the transfer to DVD is bad, with the first third in particular looking like it's been taken off an old TV dub. The sound is still good, and the ensemble & adult acting convincing enough. The camerawork and cutting in the final scenes with the villain is excellent, although the scene would have been better done at night (but would then have been too scary for the intended audience).

Watch also for the Helen Levitt style chalk drawings around the opening titles. Overall, the film compares well to similar titles such as Carol Reed's 'A Kid for Two Farthings' and J. Lee Thompson's 'Tiger Bay'.

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