The Magnet

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Stephen Murray - Dr Brent
Kay Walsh - Mrs Brent
Wlliam Fox (later James Fox) - Johnny Brent
Meredith Edwards - Harper
Julien Mitchell - Mayor
Wylie Watson - Pickering
Joss Ambler - Businessman
Gladys Henson - Nanny
Thora Hird - Nanny
Joan Hickson - Mrs Ward
Grace Arnold - Mrs Mercer
Seumas Mor na Feasag (James Robertson Justice) - Tramp

Charles Frend directed the gentle comedy The Magnet with less than satisfactory results, although the screenplay came from the firmer comic hand of Tibby Clarke. The story was based on a series of misplaced assumptions and concerned a small boy, played by William Fox (later, as James Fox, a notable adult actor in Remains of the Day and Performance).

The film was called The Magnet after its central prop, which the boy finds and keeps believing it to be a good-luck token, the boyhood toy is coveted, won, lost, auctioned and fought over. But the plot does not have the happy simplicity of Hue and Cry, and the result is an oddly charmless film in spite of being about children. The inclusion of jokes about psychiatry and the Labour government give it a middle-class attitude of the kind with which the British cinema was so frequently associated. The casting was unremarkable with Stephen Murray as the boy's father, Kay Walsh as his mother and a tramp played by 'Seamas Mor na Feasag', who looks suspiciously like James Robertson Justice.
Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing. .