Grierson And Group 3
Group 3 Films was a state-backed production company set up in 1951 by the National Film Finance Corporation to supply low-budget feature films that would be a training ground for a new postwar generation of British filmmakers. The NFFC appointed as its head the Scots ‘father of documentary’ John Grierson (a 1950s Wiltshire resident), though he had no experience with making popular comedies or dramas, his interest being in continuing in the social-realist vein of the 1930s-40s British Documentary Movement. In the 1930s, Grierson had spearheaded this movement with films like Drifters and Night Mail, and in 1938 had then gone to Canada to set up the National Film Board there. It would become the world’s most award-winning maker of documentaries - one reason Grierson is considered the father of the documentary film. But he returned to England in 1946 at the start of the anti-Communist witch-hunts after being blacklisted by Canadian senators who resented him and (as they put it) “his Jew friends”. He got the job of setting up Group 3 Films as the production arm of the National Film Finance Corporation in 1950.
     The British Film Encyclopaedia notes Grierson was so slow starting their debut feature that another producer-director had to step in. This premiere feature was a work with vague Dorset connections, the doss-house drama Judgment Deferred, which gets a footnote in film history for being Joan Collins’s debut. Judgment Deferred also supposedly concerns smuggling - the TV listings synopsis refers to "Dorset folk" who suspect smugglers in their midst and ‘some nice shots of Dorset’. But a viewing of the film (or at least the surviving 16mm TV print) shows it is studio-shot and the story setting, a bombed-out church used as a doss-house, could be anywhere. In fact the same producer-director, John Baxter, had filmed the story twice before, so the story was prewar, here updated to a postwar “rubble” setting. (A businessman goes to jail to protect his daughter, played by Collins, and a newsman has to abandon his holiday in ‘Lulwater’ to help him as the former saved his life at Dunkirk.) Grierson is credited as Executive Producer on Brandy For The Parson.

Brandy For The Parson
Directed by John Eldridge, Brandy For The Parson was Group 3’s attempt to emulate the success of the postwar Ealing comedies like Whisky Galore! and Passport To Pimlico which addressed popular discontent with continuing over-regulation and shortages of goods. It’s from a story by Geoffrey Household, author of the political thrillers Rough Shoot and the better-known Rogue Male (both set in Dorset, and filmed there, in 1952 and 1976).
     An unmarried couple (James Donald and Jean Lodge) on a sailing holiday along the southwest coast become involved in smuggling kegs of brandy across the West Country, after they sink the boat of smooth-talking Kenneth More. The title is from a famous Kipling poem about smugglers, its opening line "five and twenty ponies trotting through the dark" giving them the idea how to proceed when they meet up with a travelling circus complete with a troupe of performing Shetland ponies. They buy them as pack ponies to carry the kegs cross-country, their cover story being they are training them for the "British Imperial Trans-Andean Exploration Society." As in Ealing's Whisky Galore, the locals connive to help them outfox the humourless Excise men, out of traditional regional dislike of London laws as well as rebellion against a Postwar rationing that was in ways stricter than during wartime. (Most of the luxury goods, and even much of the food produced was officially designated "For Export Only" to help pay off Britain's war debt to America.)

Behind The Camera
Though Group 3 aimed to make inexpensive British films with the common touch, judging from this and a viewing of their other such attempt, Laxdale Hall (US title Scotch On The Rocks), their output ironically lacked the deft anti-establishment vox-pop quality brought by experienced Ealing scriptwriters. Group 3's comedies seemed a pale imitation of Ealing's. And as far as introducing young talent goes behind the camera, this proved rather hit and miss. The IMDB lists the original scriptwriter Walter Meade as having been born in 1882. Nor was he a comedy specialist, his recent Ealing credit being their stoic 1948 biopic Scott Of The Antarctic, and he wrote the aforementioned social-realist drama Judgment Deferred. The credit for what humour there presumably must go to John Dighton, who was born in 1909, was a playwright pre-WW2, and then worked as an Ealing scriptwriter, on both wartime dramas like Went The Day Well?, Next Of Kin and The Foreman Went To France, and classic postwar comedies like Kind Hearts And Coronets and The Man In The White Suit. He also wrote the St Trinian's prototype The Happiest Days Of Your Life. He would next work on the Audrey Hepburn star-launch vehicle Roman Holiday.
     Director John Eldridge had made the attractively narration-free 1947 feature-length drama-documentary of light-hearted vignettes of Edinburgh life, Waverley Steps. He would also script and direct Group 3's next effort at sub-Ealing comedy, Laxdale Hall, and their innocuous RAF-v-birdwatchers colour comedy Conflict Of Wings (aka Fuss Over Feathers). Later, he would co-script (with Genevieve scriptwriter William Rose) a better-known 50s comedy, The Smallest Show On Earth (1957), plus a handful of aviation-themed dramas. He would direct little else – the IMDB says he suffered from poor health and died in 1960 age 43. It’s been said his forte was his gentle, slightly lyrical, quasi-documentary style - early British documentaries were often lyrically shot on location, avoiding the studio as much as possible. Here the location scenes have a nostalgic quaility today, showing country villages and roads with almost no cars.
     Group 3 was not a successful venture, and Grierson returned to documentary presenting and campaigning work, dying in Bath in 1972. Its films have not been seen much since, and Brandy For The Parson is not actually the first Group 3 production to be released under this same "Long-Lost Comedy Classics" DVD-release banner - cf Time Gentlemen Please, Orders Are Orders, Make Me An Offer, and The Love Match. Its most fondly remembered film was another in the new series of Long-Lost Comedy Classics, John And Julie (1955), a charming tale of a pair of children who run off to London to watch the 1953 Coronation, filmed in colour with a supporting cast of now-familiar faces.

The Cast
As far as Group 3 being a training ground for actors, it seems to have been the supporting casts of these films that went on to more famous careers, as you can see from the DVD cover above (though why the actor who briefly playsa local vicar is there is a mystery). The same can be said for the other "Long Lost" releases mentioned above. (The Amazon page actually lists the DVD as a Charles Hawtrey film.) Hawtrey, here More's nervous accomplice, would become a household name via radio (Hancock’s Half-Hour etc) and then after 1958 the Carry On films. Amazon lists the cast as Hawtrey, Kenneth More, Frederick Piper (the Customs officer), Alfie Bass (a lorry driver), and James Donald (1917-93). The latter is nominally the film’s lead - though "straight man" might be more apt. Comedy was not really Donald’s forte - he became a regular in Fifties war dramas, his best-known roles being as the doctor in The Bridge On The River Kwai and the SBO ["CO" to Americans] in The Great Escape. Alfie Bass also became a regular awkward-squad type in war dramas and service comedies. Michael Trubshawe, here a sympathetic ex-Colonial squire, would also become stereotyped as an ex-military type (with trademark RAF handlebar moustache), often appearing in the same films as his ex-Army colleague David Niven. The female lead, Jean Lodge, never became a comedy star, being destined to wind up in horror films. Kenneth More (1914-1982), here a year away from comedy stardom in Genevieve and Dr In The House, is most effective  - though he appears and disappears throughout, he also narrates, and ends the film talking to camera - an unusual technique for 1951.

"Agreeable Locations"
The DVD case warns that the film "Contains comic innuendo" though this is rather mild by today's standards. The New York Times called Brandy For The Parson "A merry but decidedly slender little British lark." Halliwell's Film Guide characterizes the film as a "Pleasant little sub-Ealing comedy with agreeable locations but not much drive." The agreeable locations remain uncredited but the first half-hour (the boating scenes) is largely south Devon, evidently around the Salcombe estuary and Torquay (doubling as a French port), while the "on the road" and pack-pony scenes are west-central Dorset. (In case you're not familiar with the area, the hilltop megalithic standing stones they stop at are just props.) The village of 'Cordley' they arrive at [55 minutes in] is Cerne Abbas, with the old coaching inn there playing a role as a smugglers' inn. (This is called the New Inn, in both plot and real life, this term dating back to the Dissolution when inns first opened as commercial businesses - before that, monasteries ran English inns and breweries.) The Cerne area would make sense as it would be the closest point to the film's Southall, London studios where typical open West Country landscape complete with chalk tracks appears, the hills above Cerne being on the old London-Exeter road (the A30) mentioned in the script dialogue, where the bus-car crash happens. (The same area would later be seen in the 1963 comedy Tom Jones, also scored by John Addison.) The courthouse finale was shot at Dorchester, in the Old Crown Court where the Tolpuddle Martyrs were tried. As an IMDB user comments, "Location shots alone make it a keeper for England country-side lovers."

Link to Play.com [cheapest source for DVD]. For anyone interested in the work of John Grierson and the British Documentary Movement, a 4-DVD box set of 40 short films is being released 28 April 2008 by the BFI, called Land of Promise: The British Documentary Movement 1930-1950.