Pink String and Sealing Wax

This darkly hued drama from 1945 is yet another classic from Ealing Studios and was the first major film for director Robert Hamer, who is probably best known for the pitch-black comedy Kind Hearts & Coronets. The title refers to a chemist’s means of packaging his remedies and the film features Googie Withers in a standout part as the hard-nosed wife of a loathsome and alcoholic pub landlord in Victorian Brighton.

Based on a stage play by Roland Pertwee and nicely adapted by Diana Morgan, the action opens in a Brighton courtroom where self-righteous, puritanical chemist and public analyst Mr. Sutton (Mervyn Johns) plays a big role in sending a woman to the gallows. Married to his long-suffering wife (Mary Merrall), he is also the stern father of five children: two schoolboys, as well as teenager Peggy (Sally Ann Howes), the almost grown-up Victoria (Jean Ireland) and David (Gordon Jackson) - a young man who helps his father in the chemist shop. Especially Victoria and David form an integral part of the drama. Mr. Sutton is your typical church going martinet of the time who 'rules' over his family with a rod of iron, even going as far as making them recite scripture as penance. He has young Peggy in tears upon announcing that he will use the guinea pigs she thought were a present as experiments on the dissecting table, and he infuriates Victoria – an aspiring opera singer – by forbidding her to study at the Academy of Music and opt for a respectable profession instead. Of course, the headstrong young Miss has other ideas! However, well-meaning but ultimately tyrannical Mr. Sutton opens a real can of worms when he discovers that his terribly nice but inexperienced son David has been writing love poetry to a girl he’s obviously smitten with… she turns out to be a friend of his sister Victoria and now lives in London. As far as patriarch Sutton sees it, his boy is 'too young' and is hardly in a position for a relationship nor is he in a position to provide for a wife. With is usual lack of understanding for his children, dad puts his foot down and it looks like the blossoming relationship between David and his English rose has come at an end.

Is it any wonder that David is getting a bit pissed shall we say? That’s exactly what happens when, dejected and despondent, he pays a visit to the seedier part of town, enters a seafront pub and gets rather intoxicated after knocking back several whiskies for the first time. Enter the glamorous but disillusioned Pearl (Googie Withers), a woman literally at the other end of the spectrum who is practically conducting an affair under the nose of her vile husband Joe (Garry Marsh) with local spivvy lothario Dan (John Carol). This obviously is a situation that is only going to get further out of hand... and it does, namely when our hopelessly naïve David gets acquainted with the hard-boiled Pearl. Knowing full well that he has the hots for her (a fact which she merely tolerates), our scheming scarlet lady quickly realizes that she can manipulate his gaucheness to the full. This comes in particularly handy when, during a heated argument with her drunken bullyboy of a husband, she cuts her hand whereupon dear David takes her to his father's shop to bandage the wound. Trying to show off, he points out a shelf containing various bottles of poison, including strychnine which, as he explains to her, is barely identifiable from the symptoms of tetanus. Ding-a-Ling! Suddenly, the abused and betrayed Pearl gets an idea about how to rid herself of odious hubby Joe… But the best laid schemes often go astray... and it’s not long before old Sutton and his son are embroiled in a nasty little bit of blackmail… Sutton will be forced to show his metal and prove he is more than a match for this conniving hussy.

Director Hamer was very much the right director for this piece and succeeds in getting a truly bravura performance from Googie Withers. In fact, Googie had worked with Hamer earlier that year in 'The Haunted Mirror' segment in the classic chiller Dead of Night, however, here she is cast in the kind of part she was later to become synonymous with. Mervyn Johns is also well cast as the heartless patriarch and ironically, he too appeared in Dead of Night, as did Mary Merrall! Catherine Lacey (stagey as she is) deserves a mention as the trouble making old drunken biddy ‘Miss Porter’ who unwittingly brings about Pearl's downfall.

The film is a piece of neat precision (plaudits to cinematographer Stanley Pavey) and is nicely framed to - although there isn't really an exterior in sight. Only qualm is do we really believe someone as tough and scheming as Pearl would end it the way she did? Somehow, the film’s ending just doesn’t gel. It should be mentioned that this piece is pitched somewhere between a Victorian melodrama and a kitchen sink tragedy. For opera lovers we have a little interlude in the form of then leading soprano Margaret Ritchie, making a guest appearance as ‘Adelina Patti’.