THE SMALLEST SHOW ON EARTH (48)

Directed by: Basil Dearden (1957)

Starring: Bill Travers, Virginia McKenna, Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford

The Pitch: A couple inherit a broken-down fleapit cinema from a long-lost uncle.

Theo Sez: Modesty, as per the title, is an important part of this shambolic but intermittently charming comedy : modesty in the Ealing-comedy sense of enthusiastic amateurs taking on and defeating the rich and powerful, modesty in the evocation of a genteel, low-key world (where the ultimate sanction is not to sack an incompetent employee but to "say something rude and unpleasant" to them), and above all modesty in its casual approach to the "magic of the movies" : it's redolent of everything CINEMA PARADISO made such a big nostalgic fuss about, a time when audiences could smoke, projectors broke down regularly and everyone bolted for the exits a nanosecond after the fadeout music swelled - a time, in other words, when moviegoing could still be a trivial pursuit. It's also modest in its storytelling, which is to say it seems to have been written in a spare afternoon : the characters hardly develop at all and there's a few bewildering loose threads (like the ice-cream girl's unwanted - and irrelevant - pregnancy). Still, it's all very amiable - and a more polished film probably wouldn't have dared this startlingly breezy ending, blithely suggesting crime as the answer to all one's problems : it's a moment to remind you that this writer's credits include not just the snug, cosy GENEVIEVE, but also the dark, acrid joke that was THE LADYKILLERS.