Candleshoe *** (1977, David Niven, Helen Hayes, Jodie Foster, Leo McKern) – Classic Movie Review 6814

Director Norman Tokar’s 1977 British film for children is an amusing Disney adventure comedy, with a jolly script and a superb cast of scene-stealers.

Leo McKern plays small-time crook Harry Bundage, who dupes American urchin Casey Brown (Jodie Foster) into helping him seize an old country manor house, but the real owner Lady St Edmund (Helen Hayes) and her butler Priory (David Niven) try to foil the plot.

Nifty work from McKern, Hayes, the 14-year-old Foster (in her fifth Disney film) and especially debonair quick-change artist Niven, as Hayes’s butler, gardener and chauffeur Priory, lifts this good-fun slapstick mystery caper.

The screenplay by David Swift and Rosemary Anne Sisson is based on Michael Innes’s novel Christmas at Candleshoe.

Also in the cast are Veronica Quilligan, Ian Sharrock, Vivian Pickles as Grimsworthy, David Samuels, John Alderson, Michael Balfour, Sydney Bromley as Mr Thresher, Michael Segal and Sarah Tamakuni.

Double Oscar-winner Hayes appears in her last cinema movie, though she carried on working in TV till 1985 when she was 85, and lived till she was 92 in 1993. She won Oscars for The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) and Airport (1970).

Candleshoe is directed by Norman Tokar, runs 101 minutes, is made by Walt Disney, released by Buena Vista, is written by David Swift and Rosemary Anne Sisson, based on Michael Innes’s novel Christmas at Candleshoe, is shot in Technicolor by Paul Beeson, is produced by Hugh Attwooll and scored by Ron Goodwin, with Art Direction by Albert Witherick.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6814

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