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London Belongs to Me

14 votes

Classic British drama about the residents of a large terrace house in London between Christmas 1938 and September 1939. Percy Boon lives with his mother in a shared rented house with an assortment of characters in central London. Although well intentioned, he becomes mixed up with gangsters and murder. The story focuses on the effects this has on Percy and the other residents.

Status: Released

Released Date: 1948-11-05

Runtime: 107 mins

Director: Sidney Gilliat

Spoken language: English

Genres: Drama

Original title: London Belongs to Me

Production Companies: Individual Pictures, J. Arthur Rank Organisation

Production Countries: United Kingdom

Cast

Richard Attenborough

Alastair Sim

Fay Compton

Stephen Murray

Wylie Watson

Susan Shaw

Hugh Griffith

Joyce Carey

Ivy St. Helier

Andrew Crawford

Eleanor Summerfield

Jack McNaughton

Maurice Denham

Aubrey Dexter

Reviews

Geronimo1967

Richard Attenborough leads a somewhat disjointed cast in this rather lengthy drama. He is "Percy", a rather impressionable young man who lives with his beloved mother (Gladys Henson) in a boarding house amidst a host of interesting lodgers. Sadly for him, he is soon mixed up with the wrong sort - some small time hoodlums - and becomes a murder suspect. I suppose the house to be a metaphor for the broader United Kingdom following the end of WWII - a collection of the aspirational, the optimistic, and the resigned - but there are too many characters for us to keep tabs on, and though the efforts from Alastair Sim as the Dickensianly titled "Mr. Squales"; Stephen Murray, the lovely Fay Compton ("Mrs. Josser") and a superb series of scenes, rather late in the day, from Hugh Griffith all stand up fine on their own, the film as a combination piece is pretty much all over the place. Attenborough tries hard, and at times he does fire on all cylinders, but he isn't quite good enough to pull all the strands together, nor is the Sidney Gilliat direction/screenplay, so it can come across as just a little too much of an episodic compendium of loosely connected stories rather than a cohesive feature. Still, it does provide us with quite an interesting observation of post war London and of a way of communal life now (mercifully) long gone for most of us.

2022-07-09

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