Another of the movies that I recorded because the title and synopsis made it sound interesting was A Kid for Two Farthings. I finally watched it of my DVR, so now you get the review.
The setting is a street market district in a decidedly working-class part of London. It's the sort of area you'd see in a movie like Alfred Hitchcok's Frenzy, but has disappeared since then as the country has become somewhat more prosperous. Among the people working in that area is Joanna (Celia Johson), who works in a tailor's shop run by Avram Kandinsky (David Kossoff). She's in London together with her young son Joe while her husband is trying to make enough money in South Africa to pay for their passage to come live with him. (Not that he'd know that the apartheid regime would crumble by the time little Joe was middle aged.) Joe doesn't seem to go to school at all, instead running around the stalls and listening to the tall tales Avram tells him.
The other person working at Avram's shop is Sam Heppner, who works wearing a wife-beater, which seems a bit odd for a shop like this. But then, the sewing work is just to pay the bills for what his real ambition is, which is bodybuilding. In fact, a photographer comes into the shop telling Sam that he's got a free hour to fit Sam in to a a "glamour photo" shooting at a local gym where the professional wrestlers (choreographed, of course) practice. Sam goes to the gym for the photo shoot, accompanied by his long-suffering fiancée, Sonia (Diana Dors). The main reason they haven't gotten married is because Sam doesn't have the money for a proper ring or wedding.
The main portion of the story line involving Sam is that a promoter at the gym tells Sam that getting involved with pro wrestling could make him money, enough to get married on. But of course, it's highly physical work, and Sam and Sonia are both worried about whether he'd get injured doing it. As for young Joe, one of the stories he's been told is about the existence of unicorns, and how unicorns, being rare enough, can grant wishes to the one who possesses a unicorn. So when he gets a bit of extra money from Avram, he goes out to the stalls looking for a unicorn.
Of course, he doesn't find a unicorn. We know they don't exist, but little Joe doesn't. So when he sees someone with two goats, a mama goat and a kid with just one horn, he thinks the kid is actually a unicorn. And he'd like to buy it, not that he's got the money for it. But the guy selling needs the money, and eventually the haggling results in Joe using the money he's got to buy the goat.
Will the goat that Joe thinks is a unicorn be able to fulfill any wishes? Well, in the real world, we know that this is impossible. But A Kid for Two Farthings is a movie, so the constraints of the real world don't apply. Then again, maybe the things Joe was wishing for would happen anyway; after all, the story lines were starting before Joe bought the baby goat.
A Kid for Two Farthings is an odd little movie, and I can see why people might not like it. It's definitely something that would be an acquired taste, and if you dont like little Joe than it's really going to be tough to like the movie. On the other hand, the adult cast does a uniformly good job. Diana Dors shows once again that she was capable of more than being a blonde bombshell, while it's unsurprising that Celia Johnson does a good job. It's also nice to see a side of London that doesn't exist any more, even if it's likely a sanitized and romanticized version.
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