A KID FOR TWO FARTHINGS (61)

Directed by: Carol Reed (1955)

Starring: Celia Johnson, Diana Dors, David Kossoff

The Pitch: In London's East End - a place full of colourful characters - a little boy thinks his one-horned goat is a unicorn with the power to make wishes come true.

Theo Sez: Reed directed two all-time great movies - THE THIRD MAN and ODD MAN OUT - yet has never quite made the pantheon of great directors, probably because he also made a lot of stuff like this. You have to smile when one of the gags in this sweet movie has the f-word drowned out by a train-whistle - if only with the thought of how constantly trains would have to pass if this wasn't such a sanitised version of the East End, replete with fast-talking cockneys ("Talks better English than I do!" protests a parrot-peddler to a less-than-satisfied customer) and loveable Jewish tailors, plus of course a juvenile lead who enunciates his lines in a manner rarely to be found east of Holborn (though quite familiar to all good drama-schools). It doesn't really matter, any more than it matters that there's no whores and junkies in 42ND STREET, but it does make the whimsy a bit thick - it's one thing for the boy to believe his pet goat's a unicorn, but it gets a bit sickly when all the adults humour him (you long for someone to say it's all a lot of nonsense, like the mother in THE YEARLING). Astringent it ain't, though it doesn't shirk from showing that everyone has problems (and our young hero does remain fatherless at the end) ; charming and funny it (mostly) is. In a way that may be peculiar to old movies, the warmth and gemutlichkeit of the world it depicts - its sheer utopian goodness - goes beyond the yeah-right phase to something genuinely touching ; even if, in this case, it doesn't quite survive the transition from the film's world back into our own.