Holiday Camp

UK, 1947. Directed by Ken Annakin. Flora Robson, Dennis Price, Jack Warner, Kathleen Harrison, Hazel Court, Jimmy Hanley, Peter Hammond.

The first film to feature the Huggett family, later to become a household name in the movies and on radio in Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s. Here they are one element of a portmanteau film set in a holiday camp, with various characters cutting across a number of different storylines. There is Flora Robson as a intelligent but reserved spinster who finds a purpose in “adopting” a pair of young people who are in trouble with an unplanned pregnancy. Dennis Price is in caddish mode, a smarmy con-man with a sideline in strangling young women. Then there’s the Huggetts themselves, led by Jack Warner and Kathleen Harrison – a “salt-of-the-earth” working-class family determined to enjoy themselves on holiday. Some of the dialogue is very funny, although there’s an uneven feel to some of it, probably due to there being five different writers involved. It really gives a taste of the British at play in the immediate post-war years. The cast is filled with stalwart British character actors, plus watch out for a brief, uncredited appearance by Diana Dors demonstrating her dancing skills.