Hobson’s Choice (1954) - film review

In the 1880s, Henry Horatio Hobson manages both his Salford boot shop and his three daughters with an iron hand.  One day, he declares it is high time he found husbands for his two younger daughters, Alice and Vicky.  He has given up hope of marrying off his eldest daughter, the domineering Maggie – and, in any event, she is far too valuable to him in his shop.  Unfortunately, Maggie has other ideas.  She tells the world she intends to marry Willie Mossop, Hobson’s illiterate boot maker.  The timid Mossop is as surprised as Hobson, but against Maggie’s onslaught he is helpless.  Allowing Maggie to take charge of his life, Mossop opens a boot shop and sets about ruining Hobson’s business...

Whilst it may not enjoy the universal acclaim of David Lean’s better known films, this adaptation of Harold Brighouse’s popular stage play is one of the director’s most enjoyable works, a scintillating mix of morality play, melodrama and farce.  Thanks to Lean’s slick and assured direction and some memorable performances, the film was the rightful winner of the British Film Academy Award for the Best British Film in 1954.   The lavishly detailed sets - particularly the exteriors – give a real sense of time and place, namely a crowded working class town in the North of England in the late 19th century.

The great character actor Charles Laughton brings bucket-loads of pathos and hilarity to his comic tour de force performance as the laughably hypocritical Hobson, although Brenda De Banzie comes close to stealing the show as the wonderfully controlling Maggie.  As the likeable downtrodden Willie Mossop John Mills is engaging and funny, reminding us of his famous part in The History of Mr. Polly (1949).   During the making of this film, Laughton had a bad working relationship with both De Banzie and Mills – he resented being out-staged by the former and had wanted the part of Mossop to go to Robert Donat.  Hobson’s youngest daughter is played by Prunella Scales very early in her career, years before she became universally known as the long suffering wife of John Cleese in the BBC TV series Fawlty Towers.

© James Travers 2008

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