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Has anyone seen the comedy film, 'Sailor beware', 1956, starring Peggy Mount as Mrs Emma Hornet, the mother-in-law from Hell? Because on IMDB there is a comedy called, 'Watch it, Sailor', 1961, with the same characters as the original; anyone seen, or heard, this version?

Joenoir

Sailor Beware is one of my favourite guilty pleasures, it made a star of Peggy Mount who had originated the role on stage. Watch it Sailor is a sequel, and I have an idea, could be wrong, that Thora Hird played the part on stage.

Start every day with a smile and get it over with.

Joenoir

It was renamed Panic in the Parlour in the US.

Start every day with a smile and get it over with.

JamesM

Damn, you beat me to deleting my post!

Hugo

" I have an idea, could be wrong, that Thora Hird played the part on stage"

As far as I remember Kathleen Harrison played the part on stage, but she was so identified with Ma Hugget, Mrs Thursday etc. that she was quite wrong to be playing a dragon like Emma Hornett.

Joenoir

You are probably right on that one, Hugo, and Kathleen Harrison would have been even more unsuitable in the role than Thora Hird.

Start every day with a smile and get it over with.

ChristineCB

Title changes... groan

tgunnell

That particular film also other british classic were being run on movies4men on satellite

kelp

Hi Christine. They had to change it's title due to the Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis vehicle for Paramount "SAILOR BEWARE". Annoying I know.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR...YOU MAY GET IT!

Windthrop

There is also a third installment called Rock-A-Bye, Sailor - it never made it to the screen......yet

Joenoir

Something else I wasn't aware of. Philip King was in fact quite a prolific writer. His farce See How They Run enjoyed a recent West-End revival. I have somehow managed to miss the 1955 film, and the 1984 television production. I don't know how good either was.


See How They Run

Michael Billington
Friday June 30, 2006
The Guardian

Aside from Donkeys' Years, we farce-fanciers have been starved of late. So it is a delight to welcome Philip King's wartime classic back into the West End after a gap of 22 years. And, watching Douglas Hodge's superb revival, I was struck by the play's quintessential Englishness.
For a start, it could only work in a country that found vicars cherishably funny. Set in a rural parsonage in 1942, it depends upon a stage foaming with five clerics of whom only three are the genuine article. It would be idle to disentangle the insane plot except to say that the two imposters are a faintly camp actor and a fugitive German internee. But everything builds towards the moment when an apopleptic bishop, pointing towards a sofa stuffed with dog-collared figures, cries: "Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars."
Where French farce is about sex, English farce also depends on words. It's hard to explain why the name of the resident vicar, Lionel Toop, is funny: It just is; so when the camp actor is addressed as "my dear Toop", he reacts as if he's just been goosed. King also understands that, in English, the most innocent phrase can acquire a double meaning. When a love-starved, bicycling spinster announces "I'm having a little trouble with my inner tube", the mind reels.
But Hodge realises that farce, is chiefly about performance; and accordingly he has engaged a crack team. Toop's wife is an ex-thesp suddenly visited by an old chum with whom she toured for 43 weeks in Private Lives; and the sight of the svelte Nancy Carroll and the exuberantly fey Jo Stone-Fewings lapsing into their old sparring roles is as delicious as the moment in Hay Fever when the Blisses replay their old hits.
With a cast this good, it is tempting to run through the card. Tim Pigott-Smith as a gaitered bishop is a model of stiff-backed propriety. The roly-poly Nicholas Blane, as a bona fide vicar, has a sublime moment when he is handed an imaginary glass of brandy by his hostess and reacts like a saint who has wandered into a madhouse. And Natalie Grady as a strangely censorious maid and Julie Legrand as the intrusive spinster who, when sozzled, takes on the pliability of a bendybus, add to the sense of escalating absurdity.
It may be an evening tinged with nostalgia. But it proves that farce is the essence of theatre in that it requires physical agility, spot-on timing and is capable of transforming a preposterous situation into spiralling ecstasy. Like Kenneth Tynan with Look Back In Anger, I couldn't love anyone who didn't relish See How They Run.

Start every day with a smile and get it over with.

Windthrop

He seems to be having something of a revival at the moment and certainly when I was active in amdram most groups had put on several of his plays and many still were reviving them. One Monday Next still gets revived and indeed was filmed with Robert Morley and Margret Rutherford as Curtain Up.



Despite the fact that his palys were regarded as 'lightweight' his plays still remain alive today even if his name doesn't carry much weight.

Windthrop

Talking of See How They Run - the 1955 version - has anyone actually seen it recently. I say this because its one of those curious films that never come on terrrestrial TV nowadays like alot of the old Ronald Shiner farces of the '50s. He was very big in the '50s before ill health curtailed his career.

Joenoir

Cyril Smith and Kathleen Harrison in the stage production of Watch It, Sailor!

Start every day with a smile and get it over with.

Dame Starry

He looked quite different when he became MP for Rochdale, didn't he?