This highly enjoyable 1950s comedy, set on the splendid Applecross peninsula, stars a host of familiar faces in early roles and has a distinct Ealing flavour, says Graeme Hobbs.
Taking the classic Ealing set-up of a community banding together to defy interfering officialdom, Laxdale Hall sees 'an outbreak of anarchy' in the Scottish Highlands when a village's five car-owning residents refuse to pay their road fund licence until their one road is markedly improved. An emergency meeting is convened 635 miles away in Whitehall, and a parliamentary delegation is despatched to talk some sense in to the residents.
The delegation is led by Raymond Huntley's pompous parliamentarian, who remains entirely indifferent to the gorgeous scenery of the Applecross peninsula, where the film is set. ‘Personally I disapprove of scenery, it encourages people to be lazy,’ says he, and he tries to persuade the villagers of the benefits of moving away to a new model town, but to no avail. The villagers are going to have their work cut out to bring him round. They will of course, it's how they do it that matters.
In her debut film, a pert young Prunella Scales – as village schoolteacher Morag McLeod – plays the love interest along with an all-but unrecognisable Fulton Mackay who plays an affable young civil servant from the Scottish Office, while the film’s Ealing-esque kinship is furthered by featuring a number of faces familiar from Whisky Galore!
A rarely seen Scottish comedy classic adapted from Eric Linklater's novel and filmed among the beautiful scenery of Applecross.
This British comedy from 1952 sees disquiet in a remote Highland community. The few residents of Laxdale who own cars are refusing to pay their road fund licence because of the poor state of the only road which links them to the rest of Scotland. A parliamentary delegation including Samuel Pettigrew, M.P. (Raymond Huntley) and Andrew Flett (Fulton Mackay) is dispatched to the Scottish Highlands to quell the rebellion! Along the way they encounter resistance from school teacher Morag McLeod (Prunella Scales - in her first film) and her rogueish dad, Roderick McLeod (Jameson Clark).
Also features The Glen Is Ours (1946), a timeless parable of politicians at odds with the will of their electorate, in which recently de-mobbed Hector Andrews takes to the hustings to stop Cadisburn Glen being sold and converted from a Lovers' Lane into an amusement park.
