Having grown up on the more well known films of David Lean, from his 1940s period pieces, like Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, to his famed epics, The Bridge On The River Kwai, Lawrence Of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago, I was surprised to learn that he even made comedies. In fact, he only made two, 1945’s Blithe Spirit, based on a Noel Coward play, and the film under review, 1954’s Hobson’s Choice (Lean’s last black and white film), based upon a 1916 play of the same title by Harold Brighouse.
While this film is not in a league with the aforementioned classics, it is a very good film, and often quite humorous; yet this is all due to Lean’s direction and trimming away of some of the narrative fat from the play in favor of unique cinematic expression, starting from the opening shots that define the workplace of Henry Hobson (Charles Laughton, in one of his better late roles, after his career started a long, slow fade) to the many precise positionings of characters within the film frame, to the degree that many scenes play out as living detailed paintings from the very era the film is set in — the late 19th century. One particularly well wrought scene comes near the film’s end when Hobson’s oldest daughter confers with a doctor about her father’s condition, and instead of the camera following them for what will be a perfunctory exchange it stays with Laughton, who gives a bravura scene of underacted rage and calm in one.
The title, of course, comes from the illusory claim of a person to give someone multiple choices, when in reality only one is offered, à la ‘take it or leave it.’ Oddly, the very term "Hobson’s choice" is often conflated with the idea of a "catch-22," where all available choices are equally bad. The screenplay was adapted by Lean, Norman Spencer, and Wynyard Browne, and shows that transfers of tales from one medium to another can be successful if the artist recognizes the differences between media, and adapts accordingly. The source play had been adapted twice before, but both were forgettable films.
The tale is a bildungsroman of not the main, nor even secondary character, but that of the tertiary character, Will Mossop, (John Mills), a bootmaker in a small town near Manchester. Mossop has worked for his employer, Hobson, all his adult life, and has no idea of the many ways life can improve. Hobson’s boot shop is run by the widower’s three adult daughters, 30-year-old Maggie (Brenda De Banzie, who was almost forty at the time of filming), who is sharp-tongued and level-headed, and her two younger sisters, Alice (Daphne Anderson) and Vicky (Prunella Scales, later to become a major television star in the U.K.), both dreamers. Hobson feels it his duty to marry off his two younger daughters, until he finds out that marriage settlements need to be paid. But Maggie he has already given up on as being resigned to old maidhood. All three, however, are definitely not shrinking violets, and the film does a good job of capturing the then burgeoning Suffragette Movement. While Maggie is clearly the most capable of the girls, the two others have no difficulty putting their blustering father in his place. This drives the old man out on the town each night to a pub called Moonraker’s, to drink with his pals, whom he secretly detests.
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