No Kidding [Beware of Children] ** (1960, Leslie Phillips, Geraldine McEwan, Irene Handl, Noel Purcell, Julia Lockwood) – Classic Movie Review 11,643

Director Gerald Thomas’s 1960 British comedy No Kidding [Beware of Children] stars Leslie Phillips, Geraldine McEwan, Julia Lockwood, Irene Handl, Noel Purcell, Joan Hickson and June Jago. It is adapted from the 1958 memoir Beware of Children (the film’s US title) by Verily Anderson, with a screenplay by Norman Hudis and Robin Estridge.

Leslie Phillips and Geraldine McEwan play the Robinsons, a pair of young marrieds, who make the large, rundown country estate they have just been bequeathed into a rich kids’ adventure paradise as a summer holiday home vacation venue.

A typically mixed bag of young stereotypes arrives on the scene and ditto for the other adults, the best of whom are Joan Hickson’s tipsy cook, Noel Purcell’s grumpy caretaker, June Jago’s frosty matron and Irene Handl’s pompous local councillor Mrs Spicer, who wants her council compulsorily to purchase the house for her own project.

Made by the Carry On people as a Peter Rogers Production, this hard-to-dislike Brit comedy plays in much the same simple cheerful spirit, running like a series of sketches rather than a coherent story, with hit and miss gags firing off most of the time and the nice performers jumping eagerly in to fill in the script’s gaps. Julia Lockwood is very pleasing as an over-imaginative teen at the holiday resort, who claims falsely that her parents have ill treated her.

No Kidding is not exactly hilarious but it is still amusing enough in its old-style way.

The second film of McEwan, who made a false start in movies aged 21 with There Was a Young Lady in 1953, and then after No Kidding she didn’t film again till The Dance of Death in 1969.

It is a film with two of TV’s Miss Marples – McEwan and Hickson.

Cyril Raymond, Esma Cannon, Alan Gifford, Sydney Tafler, Brian Oulton, Brian Rawlinson, Eric Pohlmann, Patricia Jessel, Mike Sarne, Joy Shelton and Francesca Annis.

Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,643

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