In some aspects The Good Companions formed the basis of J.B. Priestly's pension pot given the number of outings it has enjoyed on the large and small screen since the first adaption in 1933. For me the drawing card for this, 1957, version was Celia Johnson as Miss Trant, the spinster who saves the Concert Party dying on its feet in their initial encounter and turns it around. On paper this story is the personification of simplistic as Priestly contrives to have three disparate people, a down-to-earth Yorkshire factory worker with a nagging wife, just rendered jobless even as an upper-class schoolteacher finds himself in the same boat, and the aforesaid spinster who realises simultaneously that life is for living, come together and collide with the Concert Party whose manager has just eloped with the takings and left them stranded. A plot as flimsy as this requires deft performances and here Eric Portman as the bluff Yorkshireman and Celia Johnson as the Home Counties lady of leisure are a delight. Janette Scott as the ingenue Susie Dean shares the screen if no actual scenes with real-life mother Thora Hird, as the nagging wife and Paddy Roberts, very much in vogue at the time, performing his own lyrics, provides a half-decent score. Worth a look.
Review of The Good Companions
