The Common Touch (1941) User Reviews

Entertaining booster from the early war years

[niels-4 · 7/10 · 7 July 2005]

College student Peter Henderson (Geoffrey Hibbert) turns 18 and is now old enough to take over his deceased fathers business "John Henderson & Co.". Peter's parents died in an accident years ago and he is now to learn his trade by working in the London office. In order to gain respect from his co-workers he decides to learn all about the business by attending board meetings and regular office hours. This to great distress from some of his managers who have their own racket on the side for personal profit.

Young Henderson goes undercover in Londons poorer section, among the regular folks. At "Charlies", meeting place for the common worker and the less fortunate in life, he meets an assortment of people that he becomes attached to and admire. People with small tragedies in their lives. One is the father of glamorous and popular night club singer Sylvia Meadows (Greta Gynt). He only admire his daughter from afar as he is afraid she will be embarrassed by his status and appearance. Henderson & Co. owns the property where "Charlies" is located. The company plans to tear it down and make place for modern buildings. Hendersons business partners are shrewd and Peter is making plans to expose them.

Working undercover young Henderson learns important lessons in life and find love in Joyce Howard as Mary. The film has that typical "moralistic" touch. It is made during the early war years and gives the feeling how important it was for people to stand together, no matter which class of society you are from. There are important lessons to learn from the regular folks. "The Common Touch" has a happy ending for most involved and is entertaining and fast paced.

"The Common Touch" do have some great production values. The set design is wonderful and I assume they went on location to film some of the interiors from the Henderson mansion. The location for "Charlies" place is atmospheric and authentic. Makes you feel at home there as you would in the rich mansion.

The night club scenes are fantastic. Greta Gynt does a wonderful glamorous musical number. A Cuban number with drums and a huge organ, what a combination. It is a definite take off on Carmen Miranda(Gynt did a similar number in "It's that man again", 1943). Gynt and the chorus of dancers have inventive customs. Music is provided throughout the film by The London Symphony Orchestra,, Carroll Gibbons & his orchestra and Sandy McPherson. Unfortunately Greta Gynts songs are dubbed by someone else. Too bad as Gynt knew how to sing.

Director John Baxter did well with this film. Geoffrey Hibbert is likable and believable as Peter Henderson. Perhaps his character is a little too sure of himself, he always knows best and follows this inner voice saying: "never leave the common touch". Putting that aside I enjoyed the film. Was a bit surprised that the production values were so high.

The video I watched of this film was from The American version. It appears that one musical number was cut short. Probably as the film in it's original British release was 104 min. Oh, how I wish the British Film Institute would restore these lesser "gems" from The British film history. PS! As of December 2007 there is now a restored, original length, DVD version availaible for sale in England.

The Common Touch is a jewel that is worth checking out

[climbingivy · 10/10 · 25 March 2012]

I watched this movie a couple of times on Netflix streaming on Roku.I was hooked the moment I first started watching this sumptuous film.I have never seen any of the actors in this movie before,but I was pleased with the cast.I am always looking for actors in movies and programs that I have never seen.I am so tired of the current list of actors like George Clooney,Gywneth Paltrow,Sean Penn,Jessica Lange and all of the rest of the current liberal fools that permeate the movies of today.The sets are incredible.They look like real places and maybe some of the locations are actual locations in London.Take for example Charley's Place.., Charley's Place looks like a real place in an old part of London.I loved the musical numbers.Beautiful harmonica and piano.My favorite musical numbers are the acts that came to Charley's Place.I wish I knew the name and the words of the song that was sang by the man and with the monocle and the top hat.A very upbeat happy song with a wonderful melody.If you get a chance to see this movie of an earlier time,you should.The Common Touch is anything but common.The Common Touch is a 1941 British masterpiece.

Representative

[keith-moyes · 4/10 · 12 March 2008]

I was just flicking through TV channels when I stumbled on this 1941 movie just as it was about to start. I have always been intrigued by this little-known era of British film, so I decided to watch it for a while to see what it was like.

Notoriously, routine British movies of the Thirties were vastly inferior to routine American movies. The War gave a huge boost to the British film industry and by the late Forties that gap in quality had all but disappeared. Most post-War British movies may have been too parochial in their subject matter for European or American tastes but they looked thoroughly professional and technically equivalent to the Hollywood product. The Common Touch illustrates this catching-up process in action.

Whatever its defects, it looks good. It is noticeably well lit and photographed. The production design is generally effective and the sets are unexpectedly lavish and spacious. Its a quantum leap beyond many of the pokey, cramped-looking 'quota quickies' of just a couple of years before.

The performances are not particularly memorable. Geoffrey Hibbert's Henderson is suitably callow (with hidden steel) and when he has to assume a working class accent he handles it well enough. Joyce Howard and Greta Gynt just say their lines and avoid bumping into the furniture. They are competent, but when you have said that you have said everything. It is no surprise that none of the leads ever became stars.

However, we do get introduced to the plethora of good character actors that were available at the time and it is they that carry the weight of the movie. Of course, the middle class characters are all terribly 'British' with plummy accents that might grate on our ears today and the working class characters are a stage school fantasy of the 'salt of the Earth' deserving poor, but those were the conventions of the time and there is no point in castigating this movie for not having the sensibility of movies made twenty years later.

As with so many British films of the Forties and Fifties, my main reservation concerns the material. British film-makers may have mastered the technology of cinema but were still not much good at storytelling. Barbara Emary's screenplay is only too typical of the era.

The story is just sentimental wish-fulfilment, but its 'we are all in it together' ethos probably struck a chord with audiences during the War. Young Henderson leaves school to take over his father's company and to the chagrin of the general manager, Cartwright, is not prepared to be a mere figurehead. He learns of a plan to demolish a part of Covent Garden that includes 'Charlie's Place' - a refuge for the homeless poor. Suspicious of Cartwright's motives, he decides to investigate by pretending to be a down-and-out and checking himself into Charlie's Place where he becomes involved in the lives of the other residents. Eventually he is able to defeat Cartwright's plans and ensure that Charlie's Place will be retained as part of his company's regeneration of the area.

It is a simple enough story and it is hard to see why it took 104 minutes to tell. More importantly, its various elements are quite poorly integrated.

For example, Henderson is assisted by an old school friend, but his only role in the picture is to give Henderson someone to talk to. This friend is briefly smitten with a nightclub singer, but they hardly interact and she is in love with another character that plays no other part in the story. The friend's sister is introduced early on but disappears for long stretches of the movie and is also marginal to the plot. Henderson falls in love with her, but this development occurs far too late in the movie to affect anything that happens. I guess all movies of the time had to have a love interest, but this one is especially perfunctory.

Another of Henderson's accomplices is a down-at-heel lawyer, known as Lincoln's Inn, but in the end he has no real part in thwarting Cartwright. Indeed, neither does Henderson! Cartwright is essentially defeated by another marginal character in a somewhat contrived plot development that pops up out of nowhere, like a rabbit being pulled out of a hat. In fact, it becomes obvious that the screenwriter has never worked out exactly what Cartwright's plan is and her attempts to hide this become faintly risible.

Similarly, most of the characters that hang around Charlie's Place are just 'colour' and never impinge on the actual story. Several of them seem to have fallen from affluence, including Lincoln's Inn and an ex-concert pianist, but the reasons for their decline are never disclosed. None are alcoholics.

The movie is also punctuated by musical interludes that are never integrated into the drama and further slow down its somewhat leisurely development. I enjoyed Ian Maclaren's virtuoso harmonica playing, but the nightclub numbers seemed rather feeble to me (although they might appeal to aficionados of that musical era). As a dancer, Greta Gynt was no Ginger Rogers.

All in all, it is a rather lame story, poorly structured, full of redundant characters and padded with sub-plots that mostly just dribble into sand. Nonetheless, having intended to watch it for only twenty minutes or so, I stuck with it to the end. It must have had something.

The Common Touch is of undoubted historical interest as a representative artifact of the British film industry during a now-obscure, but important, period of rapid transition.

However, I find it hard to recommend it on any other basis.