Fièvre blonde

A number of (I presume, younger) reviewers regard this film with some distaste, citing dated regional and gender stereotypes.

I think that they need to relax a bit.

The film is a comedy that pokes fun on males, females, northerners and southerners alike.

Beautifully photographed and well acted, but really not to be taken seriously.

Two scenes stand out.

Firstly when the errant husband's return from their jolly in the capital and the wives await.

The camera pans along the coach as one by one the male passengers wipe the condensation from the window and view the reception committee.

Dramatic irony at its finest, followed by a wide panoramic shot as each emerging man is seized by the collar and frog marched away like naughty children, with the attending threat:Wait till I get you home!

The second is the scene later that day when Chayley proclaims to Ethel that Ruthin is the most "beautiful woman he has ever seen" ;followed by reassuring his fiance that She (Ruth in) is not for me. She is an ideal placed upon a pedestal.

One does not have to be Einstein to figure out what the reaction will be.

Enjoy John Gregson as the hapless Chayley, Diana Dors in her dazzling prime with great support from the ever excellent and sadly underrated Susan Stephen.

And wallow in world long gone.

Filmed partly on location in the West Yorkshire town of Batley (given the name Barfield in the film), you know what you are going to get as soon as you watch that Salvation Army band marching up the cobbled market place in the drizzle and soot. Good fun for those of us who live in the town spotting the landmarks. Batley's a lot cleaner now, and the buildings are sandstone again instead of black - it still rains a bit though.

Chaley (John Gregson) owns a rag mill, the economy of the town for much of the twentieth century being based on recycling rags into reconstituted cloth known as either 'Shoddy' (now used as an adjective), or 'Mungo'. And he does what all Rugby League fans do once a year, and that's head south for the sport's Challenge Cup Final. Taking the local stories into account, the weekend trip is as traditional as ever, involving a lot of beer, food and going to clubs and pubs - and the final itself of course.

However, it's not usual for one of the girls in a club to follow you back north in the hope of parting you from your money - and that's when the fun starts in 'Value for Money', especially if you already have a girl back home who's 'sweet on you'.

Good-natured comic shenanigans follow that pulls the legs of stereotypical northerners and southerners alike. Luckily, the twain shall meet after a few plot twists and turns, and it all works out right in the end.

Note - Fifty years after the film was released, people in the town still sometimes refer to Batley as Barfield, and you can here the name being shouted from the terraces at Mount Pleasant (Batley RLFC's ground) on many occasions.

Eh, it's grim 'oop north.

This is a great classic film that just gets better and better all along the way. Diana Dors is in top form and John Gregson plays the part to all his full capacity. Take time out to catch this super movie.

This is a gentle comedy that meanders along in a fairly charming and harmless way. It isn't one of the best comedies of this period but it features a good cast, is nicely directed and is beautifully shot.

Gregson's accent is not that of a Batley (Barfield) resident but whether he could have managed it or not, the real thing might have been too much for most UK audiences leave alone those in the rest of the world.

The film portrays a few stereotypes; the Yorkshire folk who are pretty straightforward but 'careful' with money and those in London, many of whom are little better than two-faced thieves by comparison. They could easily have gone further, but they went far enough as it was. I found the interjections of Chaley's deceased father rather funny, but not that much else was any more than pleasantly amusing. The scenes in which Diana Dors (real name 'Fluck', which was understandably changed "should one of the bulbs go out when my name is in lights") appears in public and generates a major stir are probably quite realistic; at the time she was a star/sex symbol on the up (amongst other things there were 3-D nude photos of her published the previous year) and this film was one of five she did that was released in 1955.

If you like Britsh comedies of the period, have a local connection to Batley, or are a big Gregson or Dors fan, this should certainly be seen. For others it is still well worth viewing just for Unsworth's excellent photography and as something of a period piece.

Batley as it looked in the fifties got the film star treatment photographed in Technicolor & VistaVision by top cameraman Geoffrey Unsworth masquerading as the fictitious mill town of Barfield in this silly farce in which parsimonious northerner John Gregson inherits £62k from his old man (seen solely in pictures played by an uncredited Frederick Piper) and visits the fleshpots of London where we're treated to a breathtakingly vulgar and gaudy musical number before he falls for the voluptuous charms of hard and brassy Diana Dors.

Miss Dors (who at one point dives into a swimming pool in a bikini, plainly doubled for the dive itself, and emerging from the water her blonde mane still dry & set) demonstrates she sure knew how to spend money in those long-ago days when a seven-bedroom timbered house in the North of England cost a eye-watering £5,800.