Wynyard Browne’s painfully conventional Home-for-the-Holidays play, slightly opened up & compressed for film by producer Anatole de Grunwald, functions like one of those old Chinese Menus where you choose One from Column A; One from Column B to make up a meal, but with cardboard characters & standard family-conflict tropes instead of Egg Roll & Moo Goo Gai Pan. Ralph Richardson, doddering on cue, plays a decade older then he is as fading Pater Pastor; Celia Johnson, playing a decade younger, is the daughter he’s unknowingly pushing toward spinsterhood/caretaker; Margaret Leighton is glam daughter #2, drinking past sins away on a rare visit home from London; Denham Elliot the spirited, truth-telling soldier son. Also there, an unmatched pair of bickering, old-bitty Aunts; John Gregson as Johnson’s local steady, hoping to take her off Richardson’s hands; and posh Godfather Hugh Williams. The film might work, or at least play smoothly, with a better director, but George More O’Ferrall no more than functional, letting his cast overplay as if they’ve been out on the road too long. Harmless enough to please some, but amid potted crises, guilty secrets, revelations & pat resolutions, it’s more dreary than cheery.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Home-for-the-Holidays needn’t mean Hallmark Channel banal. Try Arnaud Desplechin’s UN CONTE DE NOËL to renew faith in the genre. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/04/un-conte-de-noel-christmas-tale-2008.html
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