Green Grow the Rushes (1951)

Directed by Derek N. Twist

We have extended our Easter offer through April 21st at Word & Song with a 20% discount on all upgrades, gift, and new subscriptions. We wish you all the blessings of Eastertide.

Yes, your eyes are seeing right — the title of our Film of the Week comes from Robert Burns’ song, yesterday’s poem, but with Scottish “rashes” (in English, “rushes”). But this time the rashes or the rushes really are in play! That’s because the film is about people who live among the rushes, that is, the reeds down by the shore. It’s set in a weedy, reedy part of southwestern England, away from the big cities, and that means, here, away from the meddlesome officials of the Big State. What’s their livelihood? The bureaucrat from the agricultural department would like to know, because they aren’t making full use of the land they’re on. You’d think, perhaps, that it’s a farmer’s own business whether he farms on his whole property? Not according to the official — that’s a matter that concerns the whole state. And it concerns the revenue officials, and the customs officers, and so on. I guess it should concern customs, because the local economy there is based on contraband whiskey and other such items easy to get by boat and easy to unload and sell on shore.

Does this sound like a crime film? It isn’t, not at all! It’s really a screwball comedy, a spoof of British politics, and a nice little love story to boot.

Sometimes, dear readers, you want a nice juicy hamburger, not filet mignon. Sometimes you want popcorn and a Coke, not a designer sandwich from the posh coffee shop. In the golden age of American and British films, you didn’t have to shovel millions and millions into a blockbuster all the time. You could tell good stories that didn’t pretend to be more than that. But Green Grow the Rushes is an excellent entry in that category. You won’t be able to predict what’s going to happen. But you’ll get to enjoy Richard Burton in an offbeat role as a young Irish smuggler, the “point man” on shore, and a very young Honor Blackman as a girl reporter who decides that smuggling is a lot more fun than writing a story about it. Yet the most fun is in watching a terrific character actor, Roger Livesey, as the captain of the boat, who gets roaring drunk during a heck of a tempest at sea, and instead of ending up in Davy Jones’ Locker with his two crewmen and cases of the Creature, as everybody assumes must have happened, his boat with all hands safe and sound lands high and dry in the middle of somebody’s farm, right outside the man’s front door. If you’re a fan of the BBC production of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, you’ll enjoy watching Livesey, the genteel and politically savvy Duke of St. Bungay in that series, as the quirky captain of a thousand shifts and dodges.

And what about the local gentry? Why, on the side of the local economy, of course — indeed, one of the leaders of the gang. Without getting over-satirical and twisty about it, the screenplay puts us on the side of the locals, and not with the addle-pated bureaucrats, two of whom are nice enough fellows, though you do expect them at any moment to break into a Silly Walk, funded by the Ministry thereof. So then, break out the popcorn and have some fun with this one.