Love in Pawn

I've picked up several DVD sets from Amazon of the sort of British B movie that back in the day probably never got a release in America; I've already gone through one set. I've got another set of British B comedies, and among the movies in that box set is Love in Pawn.

Real-life husband and wife pair of Bernard Braden and Barbara Kelly, who had emigrated from Canada to the UK in the late 1940s, play a married couple who similarly emigrated from Canada, Roger and Jean Fox respectively. Roger is an artist who is making a modest living as a painter, and so tries to make some money on the side as a comic book writer. Their modest living only permits them to live on a houseboat. On the bright side, they've escaped the clutches of Roger's uncle Amos (Laurence Naismith). Amos is a well-to-do man back in Canada, owning a series of sawmills, and had suggested to Roger going into that family busines, which is part of why Roger left.

As you might have guessed from my naming an actor who plays Amos, the Foxes haven't completely gotten away from him. They get a call from a solicitor who wishes to see them about a bequest. Uncle Amos has offered to give the couple a cool £10,000, which would have been a pretty substantial sum back in 1953, but of course there's a catch. The catch is that the Foxes have to prove that they're living a sober and moral life (not that big an issue), but worse, they have to prove that they're not in debt to anybody. I'd think that might be a problem if they had a mortgage, but at least the terms of the bequest only say to the trustee's satisfaction. And it's not as if the couple have a mortgage anyway; part of the reason they're living on that houseboat is because that's all they can afford.

Worse is that they don't even have the money to live in the sort of lifestyle to which Uncle Amos might be accustomed, and he's going to be coming over from Canada to check on the Foxes. They try to call in any debts from anyone who might owe them money (not much), and also find they don't have much that they truly own and can sell to raise a substantial amount of funds. Until Jean gets an idea, that is. She read about an actress producing a play who pawned herself for one night in order to be able to pay the cast. So perhaps Jean could pawn Roger off for one night, which would raise a bit of money and also allow her to lie to the trustee that Roger has been called away to work on a commission.

Needless to say, it's a daft plot, and one that's not going to go like clockwork. First is that the lies about Roger being away don't seem very convincing. But then Roger gets sent to a family that could use someone to do a bit of painting around the house, the Trussloves. They've got an adult daughter, Amber (Jean Carson), who grows to like Roger. The whole story makes the "news of the weird" across the UK, but when Jean tries to get Roger back, she finds that the pawn ticket has gone missing!

Love in Pawn is the sort of offbeat story that I could easily see a Hollywood studio having made back in the 1930s. But because this is the UK, the studio seems to have an even smaller budget than what Hollywood's B movies "officially" had, never mind that in Hollywood they had the professional production values that the studios brought to prestige movies to play off of. The result is a movie that isn't terrible, but is also decidedly not memorable apart from the premise of pawning your husband.