No Smoking

This is a traditional British comedy starring comic actors of the period.

It has the feeling of an Ealing comedy due to the fact that it is about the struggle between the " little man " and the government.

Reg Dixon stars as Reg Bates, a chemist who runs a shop in a small village. He also makes his own pills and potions.

One such pill is an anti smoking pill that stops people from wanting a fag.

However, when production starts on a grand scale the tobacco companies and the government set out to stop him. Of course , after many comic moments the little man triumphs.

This is a smart little comedy made more enjoyable by the likable Reg Dixon as the little man. Good for a few chuckles on a wet afternoon in January!

Reg Dixon was a radio comedian whose signature tune was "Confidentially".He looks rather like the magician David Nixon.Dixon had a very limited film career of two films,of which,unsurprisingly this is the last.The film is based on a play.However the idea is clearly borrowed from "The Man In The White Suit".Namely the reaction of a major industry to its profits plunging.However i find the idea of a no smoking pill in the 1950s film as being rather out of place.i cannot recall any major desire on the populations part to give up smoking.this was before the link to cancer was established.In fact when you went to the cinema you used to have to watch the film through a cloud of smoke.You could see the rising smoke picked out by the beam of the projector.This is a very lame comedy and it actually sent me off to sleep.

Reg Dixon is a village chemist (druggist). He loves bar maid Myrtle Rowe. So does tobacconist Lionel Jeffries. Dixon is too shy to mention it, but Jeffries has asked her to marry him, to no effect. Dixon has, however, invented a pill that will eliminate people's craving for tobacco. He manufactures it for his shop, but American Peter Martyn -- who loves Dixon's niece, Ruth Trouncer -- offers to make manufacturing the pills big business. Since the pills work, tobacco sales plummet, causing a major international crisis.

Dixon's vague characterization except when he bursts into song or gets into a slapstick fight with Jeffries is almost as annoying to me as to Jeffries' character, but clearly this quota quickie version of Man In The White Suit offers its charms to fans of lovers of British eccentrics. Belinda Lee is on hand to offer some G-rated, pneumatic sex appeal. Henry Cass directs for a swift 66 minutes of silliness.

A minor British comedy featuring radio comic Reg Dixon that clearly draws its inspiration from The Man in the White Suit. There are a few laughs early on, and Lionel Jeffries is a lot of fun as Dixon's nemesis, but things start to drag around the half-hour mark. The ill-fated Belinda Lee looks ravishing as a sexy industrial spy out to get the formula for village chemist Dixon's revolutionary no smoking pill.