Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly – 1969 | 101 mins | Drama, Horror | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Director Freddie Francis’ Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly was based on Maisie Mosco’s play Happy Family and implements a blackly comic approach to its subject matter, although many confuse the film for a psychological drama or horror. The film never determines whether it wants to be an eccentric family satire or psychological thriller and moves from cold-hearted murder to childish shenanigans, giving little insight on the insular family’s motivation. It opens with a tranquil view across the Thames to the gothic turrets of Oakley Court, a favoured location for Hammer’s nearby Bray Studios during the 1950s and an instantly recognisable setting of many British films. It’s an appropriately grandiose introduction, because its behavioural patterns hatched in the mansions opulent nursery, the film suggests, are traits which certain sections of society never outgrow.

Mumsy (Ursula Howells) and Nanny (Pat Heywood) live in a crumbling gothic mansion with Mumsy’s little darlings; the camera-wielding Sonny (Howard Trevor) and teenage nymphet Girly (Vanessa Howard). Their dysfunctional lives revolve around children’s games and are mainly conducted in baby talk. Sonny and Girly also maintain a tendency to coax liberated young men back to the secluded house. Should their new friends grow impatient with the endless game-playing, however, they are unsympathetically killed.

After being chased from the local zoo by the keeper (Michael Ripper), Sonny and Girly encounter a vagrant young man sleeping on a park bench. Enticed back to the family home with the promise of food and drink, the new guest soon tires of the childish games and intends to depart. The family inform him there are ‘rules’ and plead with him to play one final game of “Oranges and Lemons’. With the final lines of the rhyme; ‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head’ – Girly wields a handily placed axe.

They pick up their subsequent ‘new friend’ (Michael Bryant) in town one evening when he mistakenly believes he played a part in his girlfriends fall to her death. Consequently, Sonny and Girly blackmail him into returning to their country estate. This ‘new friend’ lodges in room #2 and quickly realises the seriousness of his predicament, and how best to stay alive. When he is forced to sit through a filmed execution of friend from room #5, ‘new friend’ is aware that his only chance of survival is to set the family at loggerheads. This he achieves by sleeping with first Mumsy, then Girly and finally Nanny.

Sonny suspects that ‘new friend’ is using jealously to turn the family on itself but it’s too late, when he challenges Girly with his accusations she rejects him with shrieks of Tony Chestnut. She then proceeds to snatch a dressing-table mirror and bludgeon Sonny to death, first in the toe, then knee, chest and finally nut. Nanny is next to feel the wrath of Girly’s newfound psychotic intensity and sexual freedom when her head ends up in a large pot boiling on the stove. Mumsy, Girly and ‘new friend’ remain to finish the game.