The Chain (1984) - film review

A black teenager can hardly wait to leave his two-up, two-down terraced home in Hackney and move into a new flat with his girlfriend, although his puritanical mum isn’t too pleased.  Still, she can always take in a lodger...  A young couple are about to put their first foot on the property lady; she wants to start a family but he wonders where he is going to find the money to pay the mortgage.  The flat they are buying previously belonged to another couple and their young child; they are about to move into a new home in Hammersmith, with their irritating father.  The owners of this house are moving to a much posher London postcode, but they make the mistake of hiring bogus removal men who rob them of all their worldly belongings.  They are then beset by another problem when the owner of their new house, a Greek widow, refuses to move on to her new house.  Can philosophical removal man Bamber solve the problem, or will the chain collapse...?

One of the very few British film comedies of the 1980s that has stood the test of time, The Chain takes a deliciously witty swipe at the rampant class system in Thatcher’s Britain whilst getting us to see the lighter side of that most nightmarish of human experiences, moving house.  The contributions from a magnificent ensemble cast – which includes such great performers as Nigel Hawthorne, Warren Mitchell, Anna Massey and Leo McKern, to name just four – compensate for some deficiencies in the screenplay whilst director Jack Gold succeeds in rendering a potentially humdrum story amusing and, at times, rather poignant.  (Don’t we all wish that all removal men could go about quoting Socrates and Descartes all day?  No, on second thoughts, that would be rather creepy...)

Perhaps the film does try a little too hard to be deeper than it is.  The underlying social messages deserve to be made with a much sharper satirical edge and the attempt to link the stories with the seven deadly sins is a little too obvious and doesn’t quite work (the gluttony and pride references make no sense at all).  Despite this, The Chain still manages to be a charming piece of satire which, whilst never being laughing-out-loud funny, is highly entertaining.  It alerts the unwary to the pitfalls to be avoided when moving house (in particular, troublesome elderly relatives, crooked removal men and vendors who strip out all the fixtures and fittings) and is certainly good therapy if you find yourself in the position of having to move house in a chain.  It is also the perfect antidote to those crappy reality programmes that now fill up the TV schedules in which talentless presenters try to persuade witless couples to buy houses as cheap entertainment for the masses.  (What we really want to see is the abject misery that ensues after the sale contracts have been exchanged and the propery market collapses...)

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