Though he wrote several plays and the screenplay for the David Lean version of Hobson's Choice Wynyard Browne's main claim to fame was that he was at Cambridge with Michael Redgrave. The Holly And The Ivy was arguably his most successful play and his adaptation for the screen reflects - despite some misguided 'opening out' - its peculiar 'English' quality. I haven't seen the play but I HAVE seen enough plays to make an educated guess that it was a one-set effort with Act One setting the scene, a parsonage/vicarage in rural Norfolk, and bringing in the family members piecemeal to celebrate Christmas with those members in turn bringing their emotional baggage. The patriarch, Ralph Richardson on top of his game, is a widower with three children, one, Celia Johnson, the stay-at-home devoted daughter prepared to sacrifice her own happiness to take care of the elderly clergyman, one, Margaret Leighton, a high-flying career woman in London, and one, Denholm Elliott, a callow youth doing his 'National Service' in the British army and these three are supplemented by two aunts, Maureen Delaney and Margaret Halston. Arguably Browne originally wrote a tight, well-made family drama which benefited from the one set but he - or the producer - has seen fit to introduce us to the children/aunts prior to their arrival for the Christmas celebrations which involved creating supplementary characters i.e., Elliott's superiors in the army who place him on a charge and grant him a pass for the holidays. That cavil to one side the bulk of the film is yet another cross between a time capsule and a valentine to an England long gone the way of the dinosaur except of course that in 1952 the England depicted still existed. Browne offers a basic conflict; Celia Johnson is in love with John Gregson who in turn has a job opportunity abroad. She would dearly love to go with him but feels unable to ask her successful sister to give up her career and return home - the aunts are themselves elderly and set in their ways and Mick (Elliott) is a non-starter. Someone has remarked on these boards that Celia Johnson is too old to play a thirty one year old and whilst that's probably - and certainly biologically - true she's such a fine actress that the gets away with it easily though she is hardly being extended here in which she basically reprises her Laura Jesson in 'Brief Encounter', in love with one man but bound to another, the difference being that in the former she was bound to a husband and here she is bound to a father. John Gregson, who plays her potential husband, was never much more than a personable leading man of the solid, dependable kind, the tweedy, pipe-smoking stock character so beloved of British dramatists and here he's required to do little more than offer his impression of a mahogany sideboard. Margaret Leighton turns in yet another variant of the beautiful ice-maiden longing to show her cuddly kitten side and it is her character - obliged to conceal an illegitimate child that today she would flaunt - that perhaps illustrates the gap between life half a century ago and today. Somehow it all comes together and makes for a warm, nostalgic viewing experience.
Review of The Holly and the Ivy
