CheerupSilver
Very Cool!!!
Konterr
Brilliant and touching
TaryBiggBall
It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.
kevuk-36830
First watched this film one Sunday afternoon back in the early sixties and fell in love with it.Great story,great acting and directing by David Lean.I have lost count how many times I have watched it and I can still watch it again and again even to this day.
edwagreen
Charles Laughton was such a brilliant actor, and shows his mettle again-this time in a comedic performance as the tyrannical widower, a drunkard, who doesn't want his daughters to marry because of the money he has to pay out for such marriages to take place.As his eldest daughter, Brenda de Banzie is terrific. She, at age 30, has no intention of settling down to a grim spinsterhood in the tradition of Olivia De Havilland's "The Heiress."She is conniving and bright and sets her intentions on John Mills, a worker at the shoe company that Laughton owns. The film is devoted to how she made quite a man out of him so that he could successfully challenge his new father-in-law by film's end.
evanston_dad
A delight of a film, and a reminder that David Lean excelled as much at small, intimate stories as he did sweeping epics.Charles Laughton plays a drunken widower who tries, without success, to dominate his three daughters. He's written off the oldest as a candidate for marriage, and takes for granted that she will assume the place of her mother in caring for him. But she has different plans, practically takes Laughton's wunderkind but timid employee (John Mills) hostage, tells him they're going to get married and sets up a shoe making business with him. Mills resists a little bit at first, but warms up to her and her plan and by the end has become the man she saw in him all along.Laughton, I regret to say, grows pretty tiresome before the movie is over. His stumbling drunken antics and rages aren't as funny as he and Lean think they are, and I sort of sighed inwardly whenever the story reverted to him. But the film more than makes up for what Laughton's story and character are lacking in the story of his daughter (played wonderfully by Barbara de Banzie) and Mills. The way their relationship evolves is a marvel of writing, directing and acting, and it's tremendously sweet. De Banzie somehow makes us love her battle axe of a character, and the character itself is a wonderful creation -- a woman who's strong in ways that matter and deeply kind, able to care for everyone in her life and draw out the best in them while the whole time making it look like she just wants to have her own way.A real treat.Grade: A
mark.waltz
The premise of this intelligent comedy of manners, or in Laughton's case, the lack of them, is the decision of his often sloshed character, to be the one to choose a husband for each of his four daughters. That's if they don't outwit him first. A series of witty vignettes shows how each of them do just that with Laughton getting into trouble along the way.Laughton creates most of the laughs, whether falling drunk into an open storage cellar, seeing the reflection of one of the prospective sons-in- laws in the mirror or discovering his liquor cabinet emptied much to his horror. The sight of the portly Laughton dealing with a chain attached to his crotch then flat on his back with his feet tangled is a sight to behold. An excellent supporting cast surrounds him, including John Mills as a milquetoast assistant and Helen Haye as an imperious customer. Director David Lean, most famous for huge epics, proves that he is just as adept at intimate stories as well.
