Sailor Beware! [Panic in the Parlor] **** (1956, Peggy Mount, Shirley Eaton, Ronald Lewis, Esma Cannon, Cyril Smith, Gordon Jackson, Thora Hird) – Classic Movie Review 8333

Director Gordon Parry’s 1956 British black and white romantic comedy Sailor Beware! [Panic in the Parlor] is the film that turned the redoubtable Peggy Mount into a popular screen star at 40 as Mrs Emma Hornett, the archetypal boisterous, noisy, unruly, raucous, rowdy, rude termagant mother of all mothers-in-law. Peggy Mount had already become a stage star in her first London appearance in the hit play version that opened in the West End on 16 February 1955 and ran for 1,231 performances.

Mount mounts a glorious comedy attack as the proverbial old battle-axe in this straightforwardly made, not exactly subtle, but still very funny version of the famous, durable, venerable British stage farce by Philip King and Falkland L Cary, who also write the screenplay. The play is now a staple of UK provincial repertory theatre.

Ronald Lewis plays Albert Tufnell, the Royal Navy sappy sailor who understandably runs away from his wedding to sweet Shirley Hornett (Shirley Eaton), apparently in a fit of nerves, because they are going to live only three doors away from his about-to-be mother-in-law. He pretends to jilt Shirley on their wedding morning to shock Mrs Hornett into recognising how badly she behaves to other people, setting off a chain of events that eventually lead to her humbling.

But the film belongs to the hilarious Mount, successfully transferring her legendary theatre performance to film, Cyril Smith as her horrendously henpecked hubby Henry, and little Esma Cannon and Thora Hird (both with more than usual to do) as Henry’s meek sister Edie Hornett and Mrs Lack, as well as to Gordon Jackson as the best man Carnoustie Bligh. That is five outstanding comedy performances.

Mount and Cyril Smith play their original stage roles.

It is Michael Caine’s theatrical movie debut film, aged 23, as a sailor (uncredited). Also in the cast are Geoffrey Keen, Jack MacGowran, Joy Webster, Peter Collingwood, Henry McGee, Eliot Makeham, Charles Houston, Anne Blake, Fred Griffiths, Douglas Blackwell, Edie Martin, Margaret Moore, Barbara Hicks, George Rose, Alfie Bass, George A Cooper, Paul Eddington, Richard Beynon, Anthony Sagar and John Pike.

Philip King and Falkland L Cary’s stage sequel, Watch It, Sailor, opened in London in February 1960 with Kathleen Harrison as Emma Hornett. It ran until June 1961, and was filmed in the same year, with the story is more or less remade as the movie sequel Watch It, Sailor! (1961), with a different cast, apart from Cyril Smith in the same role.

Stop me if you know this already, but termagant is a word from around the year 1500 meaning a violent, overbearing person, especially of women, and it comes from Teruagant or Teruagaunt (circa 1200), the name of a fictitious Muslim deity appearing in medieval morality plays, from the Old French Tervagant, a proper name in Chanson de Roland (circa 1100).

In real life, Ronald Lewis apparently was not so romantic and was known as an aggressive and unstable man, with a history of violence. He is the actor who mounted an unprovoked homophobic attack on his fellow actor John Fraser, during location filming for The Wind Cannot Read (1958). Lewis committed suicide by barbiturate overdose on 11 January 1982, age 53.

 © Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8333

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Peggy Mount (left) stars with Ann Wilton, Myrette Morven, Jean Burgess and Sheila Shand Gibbs in the 1955 London stage production.