Wynyard Browne was, along with the likes of Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, N C Hunter and J B Priestley, one of the school of playwrights who dominated the British stage during the thirties, forties and early fifties but whose work came to be seen as outdated after the revolution kick-started by John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" in 1956. Their drawing-room comedies and well-made middle-class family dramas looked very old-fashioned in the brave new kitchen-sink world of the Angry Young Men. Coward's biting wit has kept his work alive, Priestley's "An Inspector Calls" had remained a perpetual favourite and there has been a recent revival of interest in Rattigan, but Browne is today a largely forgotten figure.
"The Holly and the Ivy" is a film adaptation of one of Browne's plays. As the title might suggest, the action takes place at Christmas, and this was an early example of the made-for-the-Christmas-market movie, opening on 22nd December 1952. The main character is the Reverend Martin Gregory, an elderly Irish-born Norfolk clergyman. Gregory, who has recently been widowed, lives with his elder daughter Jenny, who acts as his housekeeper. Gregory and Jenny are joined by his other daughter Margaret, his soldier son Michael, two ageing aunts and Richard Wyndham, a family friend. Jenny's fiancé David Patterson also pays them a visit. (There appears to be some confusion about David's geographical origins. We are informed that he is the son of a local farmer, but the script also states that he is from Aberdeen, and John Gregson plays him with a Scottish accent).
David wants to marry Jenny, but as his work as an engineer will take him to South America in the near future, this will mean that Jenny will have to leave her father. Gregory has no objection to his daughter's marriage, and would welcome David as a son-in-law, but the rest of the family know that Jenny will never leave him alone in his rambling parsonage. They therefore try to persuade him to retire and move to somewhere where he can more easily be looked after, but he is unwilling to do this, believing that he still has something to contribute to the work of the Church in his parish. As the holiday season progresses, the family's other hidden secrets start to come to light, especially as regards Margaret.
Even if I had not known that the film was an adaptation of a stage play I could have worked that out from the style of film-making. Like most British films based upon theatrical plays from this period, there is little attempt to open it up; nearly all the action takes place in the snow-bound parsonage. (There is, of course, snow on the ground outside. In Britain white Christmases are much more common in literature and the cinema than they are in reality; in southern and eastern England they are quite rare). This closed-up, stagey look, however, is not necessarily a bad thing in the context of this film, as it contributes to a sense of claustrophobia, a sense that this family, some of whose members have been avoiding each other for some time, have been forced together into a greater, but not necessarily welcome, intimacy.
The film stars some of the leading lights of the British acting profession at this period. I felt that at 44 Celia Johnson was miscast as Jenny, who is only supposed to be 32. Jenny, however, feels that her biological clock is ticking and that David represents her last chance of marriage and a family of her own, so her age is an important plot point. A 44 year-old Jenny would probably have long since resigned herself to a future as a spinster. Denholm Elliott as Michael has surprisingly little to do, but the real stars of this production are Ralph Richardson and Margaret Leighton.
At only fifty (only six years older than his supposed daughter Johnson) Richardson was, strictly speaking, too young for the role of Gregory, who is probably supposed to be in his sixties, if not seventies, yet he seems convincingly older. Gregory is a man seemingly cut off from the twentieth century, worrying about the decline of faith and fretting that the cinema rather than his church now seems to be the spiritual centre of his small Norfolk town, and even more cut off from his own family. Paradoxically, it is his religious calling itself which has contributed to this estrangement; as a clergyman Gregory believes that everyone should be able to come and discuss their problems with him, but his family see him as a remote figure, more concerned with God than with other people. Margaret, as played by Leighton, is a brittle young woman, superficially glamorous and successful but underneath lonely and deeply troubled.
From the viewpoint of 2017, "The Holly and the Ivy" might seem like a rather old-fashioned drama, but in fact it was in some ways controversial in 1952. Theatre and cinema audiences of this period were not used to seeing respectable vicars' daughters portrayed as alcoholics or unmarried mothers, especially at Christmas time. In many ways it still holds up well- rather better, I suspect, than many of today's cinematic Yuletide offerings will hold up six-and-a-half decades from now. 7/10
