Touch and Go

Jack Hawkins - Jim Fletcher
Margaret Johnson - Helen Fletcher
June Thorburn - Peggy Fletcher
John Fraser - Richard Kenyon
Roland Culver - Reg Fairbright
Alison Leggatt - Alice Fairbright
Henry Longhurst - Mr Pritchett
Margaret Halstan - Mrs Pritchett
James Hayter - Kimball

Touch and Go starred Jack Hawkins in an unrewarding part as a furniture designer who in a fit of pique (brought about largely by his employer's distrust of 'contemporary' design) quits his job, sells the house and unilaterally decides that he and his family must emigrate to Australia. The edict is wildly unpopular, threatens to destroy his daughter's romance, fills his wife with misgivings and alienates the family cat, who disappears. At the end of the film the plan is abandoned, the employer is won round to a new way of thinking and the cat comes back. The screenplay by William Rose is perhaps his thinnest; the outcome is totally predictable and the plot minimal. The TechniColour photography by Douglas Slocombe succeeds in making the family's corner of London so charming and unrealistically quaint that it is hard to see why anyone should want to leave it, but then that is the basic premise of the film - better to change with the times rather than run away altogether.
Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing.