Last Holiday

For more than a decade I’d been looking for this film from 1950, which Alec Guinness made in the midst of his great series of Ealing comedies (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The White Suit, The Ladykillers), and it finally turned up on TCM.  It’s worth keeping an eye out for, though here the comedy is quite subdued amidst darker themes.  The story, by J.B. Priestley, follows an agricultural implement salesman who gets an imminently fatal diagnosis from his doctor and decides to spend his life savings on holiday at a posh seaside resort, where he is taken as a mystery man by an assortment of upper class types.  As with Chauncey Gardner in Being There, his direct statements are taken as having great hidden meaning, so an inventor, a cabinet minister, a gambler, and others, take his word as gospel and offer him unprecedented opportunities, now that he has no time left to take advantage of them. Kay Walsh is good as the head housekeeper with whom he forms a gradually deepening relationship.  The direction of Henry Cass is workmanlike at best, effectively anatomizing class types by speech and accent, and presenting topical satire on the era of austerity in Britain, but signaling the turns of the story so broadly that there is no surprise involved in how it all turns out.  Nonetheless Guinness makes the film something to see.