Green Grow the Rushes – 1951 | 77mins | Comedy | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Green Grow the Rushes was a much-troubled technician’s venture (refused a release for months); it emerges as an atmospheric but otherwise pale copy of an Ealing comedy.

The film opens with the visit of three officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to a Kent coast community suspected of smuggling brandy. They have come to look at why the people refuse to recognise ‘the supreme authority of the Ministry’, with the coastguards and customs men, they form what one of the rebels calls an ‘assorted rabble of bureaucrats’ in trying to close down the local smuggling trade.

The village asserts its historic independence from the nation through an ancient charter of independence granted by Henry III, a charter that recognises the significance of local geography in its acknowledgement of how the people claimed their land from the sea. It is this local knowledge of the creeks and rivers that enables the locals to engage in smuggling. Colonel Gill, the lord of the manor, co-ordinates the defensive action through a variety of characters, including a young sailor, Bob (Richard Burton), the boat owner, the eccentric Captain Biddle (Roger Livesey) and the journalist, Meg (Honor Blackman), who soon becomes an accomplice. The inspectors try to get solid evidence, but fail, until a cargo of brandy is washed over the sea wall into a field. The local men are called together to Captain Biddle’s boat to drink away the evidence of smuggling and the crowds at the pageant celebrating Charter Day act instinctively to ensure that the officials are thoroughly thwarted. ‘These people don’t deserve to be governed,’ announces one of the ministry officials as the sub-commission retreats, defeated.