Carol Reed’s 1955 film is a rich slice of gentle, sentimental comedy, adapted by Wolf Mankowitz from his own novel. It’s a little bit broad and not in the class of The Third Man or The Fallen Idol, but forthright and heartfelt, and boasting a veritable aristocracy of British character acting talent.
In the bustling world of Petticoat Lane in London’s East End, then the traditional home of the Jewish community, a shy little boy called Joe mopes and daydreams around the place; he’s played by Jonathan Ashmore, with the rather non-East-End stage-school child actor voice that was common in those days. (Ashmore left showbusiness after this one screen appearance and grew up to be a distinguished scientist.) His cheerful but careworn mum Joanna (Celia Johnson) is sadly missing her husband, Joe’s dad: he’s away chasing get-rich-quick schemes in South Africa.
Joanna rents rooms above a little tailor’s shop run by Mr Kandinsky, played with great charm by the actor and storyteller David Kossoff, whose assistant cutter Sam (Joe Robinson) is a rather conceited beefcake bodybuilder engaged to Sonia (Diana Dors) who is annoyed he won’t name the day. So Sam is chivvied into taking part in a wrestling bout with local man-mountain called the Python (played by pro boxer and wrestler Primo Carnera) for a big cash prize to pay for the wedding. Meanwhile, little Joe has bought a kid goat with a single stunted horn and believes it’s a unicorn able to grant wishes; he is convinced he can control the destiny of all the grownups around him. The unicorn-goat is the poignant symbol of the child’s delusions and vulnerabilities, wishes and dreams – and everyone else’s too.
There’s a lot of sweetness and fun here, and nice small roles for veteran Sidney Tafler as the rival tailor (“You’ve heard of Christian Dior, I’m Yiddishe Dior!”) and for Sid James as raffish jeweller Ice Berg, who wants to sell Sonia a cut-price wedding ring. Danny Green (famously the brutish “One-Round” in the Ealing classic The Ladykillers) plays jobbing wrestler Bully Bason, and Irene Handl is the beaming Mrs Abramowitz who in her grandmotherly way pinches Joe’s cheek with alarming force.
The wrestling scenes have drama and excitement (although the first one disconcertingly cuts out before the result) and Reed flexes some cinematic muscle of his own for the second match, giving us fierce closeups of the rapt spectators’ faces. This release comes with a trigger warning about outdated attitudes: this presumably alludes to The Python saying Sam’s muscles are just for show and calling him “cream puff”; there’s an obvious homophobic ring to that, although the jibe might not have been intended in that way.
It’s a gentle movie, but the dodgy world of wrestling here is not unlike that in Night and the City (as described in both Gerald Kersh’s novel and Jules Dassin’s film) and in its way A Kid for Two Farthings laid the foundations for a very British kind of social realism; Joe and his goat are the ancestors of Billy and his kestrel in Ken Loach’s Kes. Well, the ending is happier here.
• A Kid for Two Farthings is released on 26 February on digital platforms, DVD and Blu Ray.
