Hobson's Choice

Hobson's Choice is a Warm Glow picture. With everyone happy, married, and well on the way to becoming rich at the end, the plot is beyond the most fanciful requirements of Horatio Alger. Fortunately, Hobson's Choice is, betimes, a funny picture.

Some of the film's touches recall the days when there wasn't even a suggestion, in English comedies, of straining for sly humor and droll situation. For example, while the meek here waits in the street, three women wrangle over his future in progressively laundering voices. At the peak of feminine fury a revival parade marches by, bearing a banner: BEEWARE THE WRATH TO COME. These unexpected dividends of chuckles, like the prize in Crackerjack, are the more welcome for being quite detached from the plot and from one's expectations.

Again, as in the early British comedies, the assortment of supporting actor with outlandish faces, and acting styles to match, is another point of magnificence. Not that the principals are less than they should be. Charles Laughton as naturally a blustering curmudgeon, is almost more than he should be, his normal portrayal of Charles Laughton not being entirely faithful to the spirit of the picture. But even Laughton is comparatively restrained, and his co-stars, Bernda deBanzie and John Mills, are positively sparse in their underplaying. For Hobson's choice, whose comedy is of the delicate, throw-away nature, this is the precise treatment required. Moreover, during their scenes of pointed, only a shade below cloying, sweetness, Mills and Miss deBanzie are not hampered by the audience's recollection of them mugging and taking pratfalls but a moment before.

Actually, the film's sentimentality is not too much above the television "Life With ..." level, but it is done with such adroit good taste as to be never offensive or obvious. Mingled with the edifying tale of an artisan's development into a junior robber-baron is enough humor to make Hobson's Choice one of the year's better comedies.