Picture Show – Oct 23rd 1954
Previews
FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE
(directed by
J. Lee.Thompson). Associated British
This film stars Dirk Bogarde and Susan Stephen as two young lovers who marry and cope with the difficulties of facing the problem of “two people living as cheaply as one.”
As Tony Howard and Anne Purves, they fall in love and start married life in a one-room flat. Their only asset is Tony’s salary as a third-rate government clerk, and their troubles start at once, when two wedding presents, an old-fashioned piano with harp attachments and a large Victorian wardrobe, arrive at the same time as the essentials bought on the hire system, which fill the accommodation to overcrowding.
However, the likeable, independent bridegroom and his attractive, very-much-in-love bride cope with every situation as it arrives, including their neighbours, and in doing so, win the approval of their in-laws, and though we know their troubles are not yet over, we leave them with the knowledge that they fully appreciate the title of the film and look forward to a future that, come what may, they will face together.
A happy film, in which Cecil Parker and Eileen Herlie as Anne’s well-to-do father and mother, Charles Victor and George Woodbridge as two moving-van attendants and Sidney James as their foreman, James Hayter as a plumber, Dennis Price, Pia Terri and Athene Seyler as neighbours, Thora Hird as a busybody caretaker, and a long speech of Peter Jones on the demerits of Tony’s car which he wants to “dispose of,” contribute a lot of laughs with and against the stars.
