A Kid for Two Farthings **** (1955, Celia Johnson, Diana Dors, David Kossoff) – Classic Movie Review 5748

‘CAROL REED, the master of The Unexpected, brings you a motion picture of mood and emotion that surpasses all your expectations!’ Director Carol Reed’s sweet, ingratiating 1955 film A Kid for Two Farthings, about a London East End boy (Jonathan Ashmore, aged seven) who buys a one-horned goat at a London street market and believes it to be a wish-granting unicorn, is colourfully set around London’s Petticoat Lane market.

Diana Dors as Sonia, David Kossoff (excellent as the old suit-maker Mr Kandinsky), Sydney Tafler, Irene Handl, Sidney James (as Ice Berg), Danny Green and Alfie Bass easily pass for Cockneys – some of them are actually Londoners. They are all good and welcome performers. However, posh Celia Johnson from Richmond, Surrey, sticks put like a sore thumb and struggles with the East End accent in an unconvincing turn as the boy’s mum, Joanna.

Mr Kandinsky has told the small boy Joe that a unicorn will grant any wish, so the boys starts saving his pocket money to buy a kid with an emerging horn.

All very British and very Fifties, this fine, well respected but too little known movie is lovingly handled by Reed and smoothly scripted from his own novel by Wolf Mankowitz. An added attraction is that it is shot in lovely Technicolor by Ted Scaife in Reed’s first colour film.

Following her appearance in The Weak and the Wicked [Young and Willing] (1954), the film helped to mark Dors’s transition from a dumb blonde caricature into serious actress.

Also in the cast are Brenda De Banzie, Primo Carnera, Joe Robinson, Lou Jacobi, Daphne Anderson, Joseph Tomelty, Harold Berens, Harry Baird, Eddie Byrne, Madge Brindley, Harold Goodwin, Harold Kasket, Sam Kydd, Harry Locke, Spike Milligan, Norman Mitchell, Derek Sydney, Barbara Windsor and Vera Day as Mimi.

A Kid for Two Farthings is directed by Carol Reed, runs 96 minutes, is a Big Ben and London Films production, is released by Independent Film Distributors (UK), is written by Wolf Mankowitz, based on the book by Mankowitz, is shot by Ted [Edward] Scaife, is produced by Carol Reed, with Alexander Korda as executive producer, and is scored by Benjamin Frankel, with Art Direction by Wilfred Shingleton.

Jonathan Ashmore is the son of actors Peter Ashmore and Rosalie Crutchley. Today he works as the Bernard Katz Professor of Biophysics at the University College London, Ear Institute. A Kid for Two Farthings is his only film role.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5748

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