User Reviews

This film is tremendous good fun, from the deliberately zany credit sequence onwards, and still goes down a treat with the youngsters at a Saturday morning matinée. A good deal of it really is pretty funny on a laugh-out-loud level, although it's not a comedy as such -- the jokes are generally in the throw-away lines and visual gags rather than in the plot as such, which is more of a children's adventure story. (It's notable to a modern eye that in the 1940s, the adolescent heroes of this story are all at work and earning in their mid-teens: there's one sequence at the end where we see what is basically a montage of all the different potential boys' jobs in London, from the BBC to the G.P.O. via the ice-cream trade!)

The story is the classic Enid Blyton/Anthony Buckeridge-style tale of the over-imaginative child who stumbles upon genuine villainy and perceives it in terms of an unsophisticated thriller, only for the adults, unsurprisingly, not to believe a word. The plausibility does get strained a bit when it transpires that all the exotic villains listed in the pulp-fiction stories of "The Trump" are genuine London criminals under the command of the sinister mastermind, not to mention the fact that all the authority figures in the film turn out to be in on the plot, but it's a good, fast-moving production that bears a strong resemblance to children's books of the era and presumably appealed to the same audience. I was actually surprised to find the film unexpectedly sophisticated: it offers considerable enjoyment on an adult level and I wonder how many children even at the time would have got all the comic allusions. (It is also remarkable as one of the few films of any genre where a vehicle crashes over the edge and *doesn't* burst into flames!)

To the modern eye, of course, the location shooting also offers a fascinating document of a world that has all but utterly disappeared, from Covent Garden to the post-war bomb-sites, and a society that has gone with it, from bus conductors to milk-carts. Alistair Sim has an entertaining cameo as a timid writer of thrilling tales, but the film is mainly carried by the boys, who are by and large very natural in their acting style. Harry Fowler in the lead is particularly good.

This is a well-made little film that plays tricks with its genre and with its audience's expectations and deserves a wider reputation: I knew it only from a few seconds' montage in a documentary on Ealing Studios, and it is far less widely available than their famous later output. The Ealing film of which I was reminded most closely -- perhaps because of a similar setting -- was actually "Passport to Pimlico", although this is clearly pitched at a younger audience.

This apparently was the first comedy by Ealing Studios, and while it is far from their funniest, it was amazingly good and set the stage for even better films to follow. It's a fanciful story that is reminiscent of some of the films of the 1980s and 1990s where kids are smart and need to teach the grownups a thing or two--something that was very novel in 1947.

The film begins in London just after the war. The film is interesting because of all the still-evident bomb damage from the blitz. It's all about a group of precocious kids--one in particular. Through some strange coincidences and clever thinking, they figure out that a gang is using a comic page in the newspaper to broadcast instructions to the individual members. However, when the gang get wind of this, they turn the table on the kids and now the police won't believe their wild story about secret codes and robberies. So, it's up to the kids to take the law in their own hands and save the day in one of the more rousing finales I've seen in a long time.

Excellent and original, this one is well worth a look due to clever writing as well as an ending that is very hard to forget.

Like some other reviewers I first saw H and C at the now long-forgotten Saturday morning pictures and it was thoroughly enjoyed by just about everyone there. Such a refreshing change from the usual feature films they dredged up for us, most of which seemed to date from the early thirties and to be based om motor racing.

Having seen it many times since it's difficult now to know what I remember from that first time but I do recall the remark of the sadly missed Joan Dowling when they first descended into the sewers, "Coo, dunnit pong", causing great hilarity. Easily pleased or what?

Much as I enjoyed reading the reviews here I have to take issue with some. One claims that the lack of swearing among the boy gang indicated some sort of superior morality back in 1946. Actually it was because bad language was simply not permitted in films then and I can assure everyone that in real life there would have been plenty. Another stated that Anthony Newley was in it. He wasn't. I think the reviewer was fooled by the Newley-like looks of Roy, played by Stanley Escane. And a third thinks that jumping on the stomach of the chief villain and killing him was a bit strong. I saw the film recently and there is no indication that he was killed, merely winded. It was perhaps unpleasant but if anything the scene where the bent cop was catapulted and stunned was worse. That could have killed or blinded him.

I was more interested in the review by Robert Temple. I have nothing against the gentleman and he is entitled to his opinion but I feel that some of his comments are misguided and on occasion just plain wrong. He seems for example to read into H and C, with its use of bomb sites and derelict buildings, some sort of metaphor for WWII but I think he's reading too much into this. The film was made on location in London in 1946 when the makers would have been hard put to it not to include bomb sites. They were an unavoidable backdrop to the action, not a part of it, though as they existed use was made of them. The film is simply no more than what used to be called a rattling good yarn and thankfully does not contain any 'messages'.

Further, amid what I have to say is a welter of name dropping, Mr Temple not only (wrongly) thinks that some of the action takes place in Tilbury but also makes a glaring geographical error in placing Tilbury in the East End despite its position in Essex some 12 or 13 miles from the fringes of the East End at East Ham. While there is certainly a Chadwell (St Mary) in Tilbury this is similarly miles from the scene of the action at the end of the film which is, officially at any rate, at Wapping and I suspect that Mr Temple has confused Chadwell with Shadwell, which is next door to Wapping and therefore does come within the East End.

Although (understandably) dated, this film snapshots post-WWII London and the youthful optimism for the future.

After the initial confusion, the concept becomes much clearer with good directing, and can be understood to be very cleverly contrived.

The lead kid (Harry Fowler, as Joe Kirby), looking for a job, accidentally stumbles upon a scenario that looks all too similar to a story he'd been reading in a comic book. It turns out that the comic book story is being followed by a gang of crooks who are using this as a code for their clandestine operations. In effect, therefore, the author of the comic story is the unwitting mastermind of their plans.

The general acting is stolen by the youngsters in the film... bright, cheery, enthusiastic, clever, presentable, believable. Very interesting also to see the great Jack Warner in a non-police role.

Very good direction and production values.

Unbelievable, but well made and fun nevertheless.

I shudder to think what the 'academics' will talk this one up. Consider: a determined group of 'little' people triumph over a gang of bullies aided no little by 'cracking' a code. I can hear them now in Film 'schools' the length and breadth of the land 'explaining' how to 'read' this as a metaphor for an England who had just won - with a little help from their friends - a major war against Germany aided by their cracking of the 'Enigma' code. I doubt whether screenwriter Tibby Clarke had anything more meaningful than a paycheque in mind when he dreamed up this yarn in which a group of unsophisticated teenagers without an 'O' level between them, uncover a plot involving a weekly comic book for boys which villains use to communicate details of proposed robberies. Alistair Sim is top-billed but as the writer of the serial he has only two scenes whilst Harry Fowler as the leader of the boys appears in virtually every one. It's all a tad gung-ho but given that it was shot in 1946 that's to be expected. Though it's an Ealing film it's meant to be serious so do try not to laugh.

Today 'Hue and cry' stands as a fascinating socio-cultural document of post-war Britain, shot in location in the East End, around Covent Garden and in some of the ruins left from the Blitz. It not only is a quite entertaining and exciting boys' adventure but it also shows us what British teenagers were like in those days. Many of them were already earning their bread because the times were hard and many families had lost their men in the war. Also, having not the means of entertainment the boys of today have (television, motorbikes, computers...) meant that boys then were always in the street and often had some special meeting place out of the adults' sight where they idled for hours without doing anything in particular. Apart from cinema-going, the only source of popular entertainment they had were comics. That was the golden era of the Eighth Art.

The film benefits from a very imaginative script. The implausible story is yet engaging and has moments of fine suspense: Kirby sneaking into the furrier's shop to inspect the suspicious-looking crates, he and Alec creeping up the staircase to Alistair Sim's flat, his realisation of the mastermind villain's identity and the final confrontation at the bombed office block by the river.

A fantastic cast of talented youngsters, humour, suspense, lots of excitement and a marvellous Alistair Sim in a ten-minute appearance that nevertheless plays a key role in the story.

A film that may look very outdated now, but still great fun to watch, and definitely a landmark in British post-war cinema.