A Run For Your Money

There was always something rather cosy and cup-of-tea-ish about Ealing comedies and this 1949 comedy about two Welsh colliers who win a £200 newspaper contest price plus a trip to London to watch the England vs. Wales rugby match at Twickenham Stadium is no exception.

On the whole the kind of people who inhabit these films no longer exist if indeed they ever did in these immediate post-war films. Here we have two Welsh brothers, David 'Dai Number 9' Jones (Donald Houston) and Thomas 'Twm' Jones (Meredith Edwards) winning a contest run by the fictitious London newspaper The Echo - the prize being a hundred quid each and coveted tickets for a Wales vs. England rugby match at Twickenham. The lads in question have the misfortune (not that they see it that way) to live in a little Welsh Colliery town with an unpronounceable name (obviously there will be jokes a-plenty arising from this) and work as you would expect 'down the mine'. They are actually brought up from the pit shaft in a lift going at an amazing speed and greeted with this wonderful news by the colliery manager amid cheers from their affable colleagues. Next they are loaned a couple of bowler hats (necessary for London it would seem) and given a send off sing-along all the way to the station. The Welsh it would appear never stop singing and Twm has a fine tenor voice. The train is cram-packed with fellow countrymen traveling to London for the match and of course they also never stop singing. Dai and Twm are to meet Whimple (Ealing favourite Alec Guinness sans toupee for a rare change), a gardening columnist for the Echo, at Paddington station but nobody had informed the two coal miners about this. Unfortunately no one can pronounce the name of the village (Hafoduwchbenceubwllymarchogcoch if you must know) that the brothers come from. An announcement is made over the tannoy asking for some men from Wales called Jones and you can imagine the response (a near irresistible joke this) - if you took the people with this surname out of Wales there would not be many left there. Within no time things go hopelessly pear-shaped when the brothers lose each other minutes after arrival during tea in a Paddington café, but not before Dai falls prey to crafty female con artist Jo (a nice performance from Moira Lister) who just happens to overhear the brothers talking about the two-hundred smackers which they are to pick up at the newspaper office. Flirty Jo quickly devices a plan to get her thieving hands on the lolly by suggesting they go to the Echo editorial to pick up the prize there and then while the editor makes Whimple responsible for showing Dai the sights around town (seeing how Twm has gone missing) though Jo soon manages to persuade the naïve and obviously smitten Dai that they’re better off without their ‘tour guide’ – all part of her plan of course.

Meanwhile Twm, in his search for Dai, happens to bump into Welsh busker Huw (the inimitable Hugh Griffith) as one does, singing (of course) in the street by the station. Huw is in fact from the same Welsh village and was a former champion harpist with whom Twm had won the grand prize at a local music festival. Now Huw has pawned his beloved harp and hit the bottle. Never fear, Twm (who is doing his best to look after Dai's borrowed bowler hat) will get it back for him but not before some drunken shenanigans bring them into more trouble – not helped by the fact that Huw is carrying his harp everywhere with him. Wide-eyed Dai nearly falls in love with the scheming Jo who not only takes him for a ride but to a pub where a ‘meeting’ with her partner in crime Barney (Leslie Perrins) leads to ever more mayhem and suffice to say neither brother manages to see the actual game. This being a well meaning Ealing comedy Jo can't possibly be all bad but anyway, Dai’s already got a girl back in you know where.
The film has a lot of heart and is certainly well intentioned. There are cliches abutting all over the place. One might get the idea, as the brothers keep narrowly missing each other, that London is quite a small place. We even have Twm and Huw (tenor and harp) winning an Amateur Talent Competition where Dai finds himself in the audience. The Welsh are seen as - quite frankly - a pair of gauche twits let loose in the seething cesspit of the busy post-war metropolis and are pretty much out of their depth. This was a time when London was choc full of spivs and con artists. It appears that the film was not as popular in Wales as it was in England… one wonders why? Yet Clifford Evans wrote the story and Diana Morgan contributed additional dialogue and you couldn't get much more Welsh than them. Charles Frend, who also contributed to the screenplay, directs with aplomb. Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe is in fine form on the technical side. Donald Houston and Meredith Edwards are likeable in the leads and Alec Guinness with his jaunty swagger gives his usual well-rounded characterisation. It would be a hardened heart that would describe this as a load of Welsh codswallop. Boyo, I tell you see!

A RUN FOR YOUR MONEY is released newly restored on Blu-ray and DVD.