Two brothers, country-boy Welsh miners, come to London for a day to collect a prize won and to see a football match. They are separated when they arrive and spend the rest of the film trying to find each other. One, a handsome, naive lad (of the sort Bill Travers played in WEE GEORDIE) is alternately taken in tow by Alec Guinness, an effeminate garden-column writer, and by Moira Lister, a larcenous blonde. The other meets up with old-friend, street-singer Hugh Griffith, and they get wildly drunk. The pacing is superb, and the style is realistic. There is a large variety of amusing characters, the most memorable of which is Joyce Grenfell in a fancy dress shop. It's all extremely cleverly done, and filled with well-timed laughs. You don't see the laughs coming; in that sense they're never predictable. Nor are they easy, lazy laughs; they're very deftly worked out. Yet it doesn't go beyond that consummate skill. Halliwell, as usual, puts it very well; "with characterizations as excellent as they are expected." Somehow, the film isn't quite as pleasing as should be. This is largely because of the naive lad's relationship to the con-girl; one has to wonder about the worth of a man who'd completely forget his fiancé in a day, and Lister's weak performance doesn't give the conceit any help. Also, the level of farce is occasionally pushed beyond its limits. It's OK that the brothers keep missing each other like people slipping in and out of doors in a stage farce, but for Griffith and the brother he's with to literally pop in and out of the doors of the underground train, and stretch the routine to the limit, seems a bit much. But one feels a bit bad complaining about the weaknesses of the film, because it is very entertaining, and a skillfully made comedy.
