One Good Turn (1955) - film review

Norman is an amiable odd job man at an orphanage, popular with the staff and the youngsters alike.  When one of the orphan boys, Jimmy, takes a liking to an expensive model motor car in a shop window, Norman foolishly promises to buy it for him.  When he realises he must honour his pledge, Norman has no option but to try to raise the twelve pounds he needs to buy the car, not an easy task for a man in his position.  Norman’s other preoccupation is Iris Gibson, a teacher whom he has come to idolise, not knowing that she is already romantically attached to another, more attractive man, Alec Bigby.  The latter’s father owns the land on which the orphanage is built and intends to sell it so that a factory can be built in its place.  When the staff at the orphanage hear of this news, they decide it is time to go on the offensive...

When Trouble in Store (1953) proved to be a runaway success, making its lead performer, Norman Wisdom, an instant national star, a follow-up was soon put together by the same production team, with Wisdom returning as the one-man disaster area who always manages to win through in the end.  This film provided something of a template for the next few Norman Wisdom films, firmly establishing the actor’s gump persona and making him a vehicle via which the absurdities of the British class system could be exposed to great comical effect.  With his individual brand of anarchic comedy, Wisdom was the natural successor to Charlie Chaplin and Will Hay, and a necessary precursor to the more overtly anti-establishment comedians of subsequent decades.

One Good Turn exemplifies the best and worst of Norman Wisdom’s films.  It contains some of the comic actor’s most memorable slapstick set-pieces (including the one in which Norman finds himself conducting a symphony orchestra) and one sequence that is the stuff of comedy legend.  The latter sees Norman stumbling into a first class railway compartment, where he unwittingly aggravates a collection of the most po-faced passengers you can imagine with a bag of sweets, a bottle top and a jam sandwich.  What makes this scene so amusing is that Norman’s character has absolutely no awareness of his social standing and fails to see the class barrier that separates him, a working class nonentity in a flat cap, from his social superiors.   This sublime class-blindness may be what lay at the heart of Wisdom’s popularity, the thing that made him both a working class hero and the most popular comic of his day.  It is no coincidence that his career went into a sharp and irreversible decline when class distinction became much less of an issue, in the 1960s.

What mars this, and some of Wisdom’s subsequent films, is the intrusion of some unnecessary over-baked sugary sentimentality.  Excessive mawkishness is not something one finds a great deal of in British cinema and where it does occur it inevitably turns the stomach and causes the toes to curl in revulsion.  When Norman gets all dewy-eyed over a batch of angelic children whose adoring parents have just been abducted and turned into cat food (or suchlike) the gut reaction of any self-respecting Brit is not to sympathise but to reach for the sick bucket.  Mercifully, such moments of egregious sentimentality would become less frequent as Wisdom’s career progressed.  Even when such bursts of unwelcome soppiness did occur they are easily endured, because you know that in the very next scene Norman will be back to his old tricks, knocking down half of the set, leaving a trail of mayhem and devastation in his wake, or just making life Hell for some more obnoxious posh people.  No one can dislike a guy like this for long.  He’s a one-man socialist revolution.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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