Dinah Might
George’s
potential squeeze in ‘Get Cracking’ is Dinah Sheridan, aged 23 and at the start
of her career. Dinah will always be best known to me (and probably much of my
generation) as the mother in the 1970s film of ‘The Railway Children’ and to
see her so early on in her life is a happy curiosity. But she does seem to be
rather an odd choice for the role of Mary Pemberton. Both George and the actor
who plays Mary’s father (Lancashire born Frank Pettingell) sound as northern
and as common as can be, while she talks like she has half a pound of plums in
her gob and it’s just too noticeable and incongruous. I have to really try hard
to believe that snooty Mary fancies dippy George. Lovely as she is, I can’t
think why they chose her. I wonder if it was an attempt to appeal to the officers
as well as the privates in the Home Guard audience?
 |
| "I can't tell a word you're saying" |
A
much better bit of casting is the glorious appearance from one of my favourite
bit-part actresses, Irene Handl. She ramps up the dizzy, wandering in and out
of the Home Guard office wittering on about “our Ben”, a mythical character who
is always elsewhere. My favourite part is where she comes in seeking the
teapot, and finds that their Ben, the tidy soul, has put it in the filing
cabinet (under T of course). She adds a great bit of down-to-earth fun to the
film and it would be much duller without her. Here we see on screen the
forerunner of those Carry On characters that Irene was to so memorably play
over a decade later on.
Her
role also serves to re-inforce the message that these Local Defence Volunteers
were ordinary men with other lives running parallel. Much is made at the
beginning of the film of the trouble of fitting guard duties around social
lives – you can’t put so and so down for Tuesday because that’s his night at
the flicks and so on. The Home Guard had jobs, meetings to attend, courting to
do and dippy sisters chasing round after them. It puts the British in a good
light – that men were doing this job out of choice, and not because it had been
dictated to them.
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