Miss Pilgrim's Progress

A factory girl from Hoboken does a one-month swap with a British girl and is billeted in an isolated West Country hamlet of 30 houses, no mains services, many rustic eccentrics, and a daily five-mile cycle-ride to the factory. Michael Rennie and she have an on/off courtship under strain from Government plans to develop the area. Her involvement embarrassingly results in national publicity. A rather pleasing glimpse into England of 1949 and how we saw ourselves. Some good chuckles and memorable lines here and there.

Yolanda Donlan is the eponymous "Lar" who arrives in Britain as part of a employee swap. She is to work in a factory and see whether or not she can impart any words of wisdom to the staff and the bosses about American working practices. After a while she becomes aware that the local council has eyes on their town. Citing it's "plumbing" as unsuitable for modern day living, they propose to buy up all the houses and relocate the hitherto villagers to a new town. Initially full of vim and vigour, they - led by her new love interest "Bob' (a rather lacklustre Michael Rennie) are gradually worn down until it falls to their feisty and determined visitor to remind them of Magna Carta - and to enliven and embolden their spirits. At times it's a gently rousing comedy drama with a fun "worm that turns" aspect, but that doesn't quite butter the toast here. There are too many lulls in the plot and the rather pedestrian nature of the stereotypical look at the post war British population - exemplified by Peter Butterworth, Reginald Beckwith and Jon Pertwee rather pigeon-hole the "yokel" hosts and leave the "over there over here" mentality just a bit too prevalent for the film to really thrive. It's not terrible, but I wonder how - if it all - it went down in the USA. Here, it's just a bit too reliant on some lazy and uninspired writing.

Yolande Donlan finds herself in a swap. She is sent to a small English village, while a girl from that place is sent to America. There's a lot of fish-out-of-water and two-nations-separated-by-a-common-language humor, but the people are pleasant, welcoming, and insist on serving her coffee, which she politely drinks while despising it. Michael Rennie is on hand to serve as love interest, and Peter Butterworth and Jon Pertwee as local characters. Garry Marsh plays the mayor in a relatively straight manner.

That's not enough for a movie. A crisis arises. More than half of the houses in the village are deemed uninhabitable, and the drainage system is a mess. Central planning in London deems it more economical to move the population, which they hate. The sorting out of the situation takes up the second half of the movie. In many ways,writer-director Val Guest has devised a movie that struck me as arising from the same impulses as the Ealing Comedies, in which a small group of people.

The copy I looked at looks like it was derived from a 16mm. Print via VHS. There's no record of it having played on British or Australian television, although it was telecast in Los Angeles in 1950. Given that the only material on it seems to be this print and a 16mm. One held by the BFI, you might wish to give this agreeable feature a viewing on its own terms.