Wee Geordie

The publicity men who billed Wee Geordie as an uproarious comedy did it an injustice. The film is not in the bubbling broth of a wee tradition of such films as Tight Little Island. Instead, its value is in the nearly dream-like simplicity and charm of civilization in a Scottish highland glen, and in the excellent photography of bonnie lochs and braes. There are also neat touches of comedy, but they seem subordinate.

The plot advances with what at first seems blissful naivete, but the dependable simplicity and expectability of nearly everything soon becomes a pleasant, quiet part of Wee Geordie's world. Geordie is painfully tiny as a bright young lad. He enrolls in Mr. Samson's Home Bodybuilding Course. When next seen, at the age of twenty-one, he is a well-built tower, about six and one-half feet high. He wins the hammer throw in the Olympics, and then promptly renounces athletics to return to his highland lass, and to resume the idyllic life as the Laird's head gamekeeper, in the glen.

Comedy enters only occasionally, but nicely. The scene in which, as a demonstration of technique, the eccentric old Laird and a sledge hammer wind each other up and hurl themselves into space is exquisite. The Laird becomes a most amusing exaggeration of a country squire with the overplaying of Alastair Sim, who can squint, fidget, grimace, say nothing at great length, and provoke laughter as well as any British character alive. The large Wee Geordie is played by Bill Travers, who in such a "natural man" role, does not have much positive acting to do, yet does it well.

The other actors are also fitting, and if one excuses the sometimes unrealistic sequence of events, there is little to criticize in the peaceful atmosphere of Wee Geordie. 'Tis a braw film.

Since it is also a short film, the Exeter has padded the program with The History of the Cinema, a rather primitive cartoon imitating the UPA method and wit with lame success. There is also a ten-minute visit to England's Trooping of the Colours, one of the world's few surviving large scale pageants. The film is appropriately impressive and colorful.