This movie has a very promising idea and it does deliver some occasionally bright dialogue, plus some humorous bits of comedy "business" and maybe three or four moments of inventive direction from Cyril Montague Pennington-Richards. By and large, however, the film is a bit of a disappointment – despite its entrancing location photography by Wolfgang Suschitzky and a most attractive heroine in the person of Virginia McKenna. Alas, the whole idea of the newspaper framing story is not very workable. I feel that the comedy would have developed much more fluently in some other field. Another problem is the direction. Certainly, Pennington-Richards has his moments and, on the whole, the direction could be described as smoothly competent, but it often lacks the skill needed to point up and underline the satire by a judicious choice of camera angles. For the most part, the compositions are both ordinary and uninspired. Only the scenes up the well reveal any flair for the right comic touch. Another problem is that the cast line-up is weighted too heavily on the dramatic side. Michael Medwin is okay and Joseph Tomelty is superb, but Warren Beatty, Mervyn Johns and the rest of their team are too glumly serious for the light little fantasy that the script proposes. U.S. release title: The Horse's Mouth.
Review of The Horse's Mouth
