In this rereleased comic drama, Hayley Mills and Hywel Bennett play a couple plagued by a wedding-night disaster and the neighbours’ wagging tongues
‘It’s life, lad. It might make you laugh at your age, but one day it’ll make you bloody cry.” After 54 years, this British movie from the Boulting brothers flares like a struck match with broad comedy, fierce sentimentality and a strange dark sense of life’s painfulness – and it’s an amazingly vivid time capsule of Britain in the 1960s. The Family Way, rereleased on digital platforms, is based on a stage play by Bill Naughton, itself developed from his Armchair Playhouse TV script, and directed by Roy Boulting and produced by John Boulting, with a musical score from Paul McCartney, arranged by George Martin.
Hywel Bennett brings his discontented-cherub presence to the role of Arthur Fitton, a young cinema projectionist in Bolton. (They’re incidentally showing Karel Reisz’s racy Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment and also Alfie, starring Michael Caine, based on Naughton’s play.) Arthur is getting married to Jenny Piper, played by Hayley Mills. Jenny is a virgin, as nice girls in those days were supposed to be before their big day, and presumably Arthur is also, although this is never explicitly remarked on in the same way, and – in art as in life – we are perhaps invited to assume that, whatever his later difficulties, the man involved will have discreetly understood the groom’s responsibility for gaining experience before his wedding night. Arthur’s mother and father are played by John Mills (father of Hayley) and Marjorie Rhodes; Jenny’s parents by John Comer and Avril Angers.
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