WHAT THE BUTLER SAW

UK, 1950, 61 minutes, black-and-white.
Edward Rigby, Henry Mollison, Mercy Haystead, Michael Ward.
Directed by Godfrey Grayson.

There is no particular reason for seeing this film. It plays like a West End farce with a sexual theme and some innuendo, 1950s style. (There was quite a different tone in the West End almost 20 years later with Joe Orton’s play of the same name.)

However, the 1950s style is interesting in its portrait of Britain, aristocrats with airs, colonial government, ‘Great Britain’, attitudes towards colonial countries and the interpretation of the inhabitants as savages and cannibals, and racial prejudice in the upper classes as well as the downstairs classes. There is the haughty sister of the Earl, a snob, a semi-ass grandson in the Foreign Office, ultra-preoccupied with his job, publicity and the press.

Edward Rigby plays an Earl (not like his usual rather more working class roles) who has been a governor in the colonies and returns with his faithful butler (Henry Mollison). They have been out of England for 10 years and are returning to the family mansion. Quite a lot of hunting trophies – but, in one of the boxes, the princess from the Coconut Islands, has stowed away because she is infatuated with the butler.

Needless to say a lot of complications about her relationship with the butler, and her wearing a sarong everywhere but she does take a bath in the kitchen sink! The aristocrats are quite upset. Visiting bishop and general take it much more calmly. The woman in charge of the kitchen is so upset she wants writes a letter to the agony aunt, Aunt Muriel, which tips off a reporter to visit – but fortunately he becomes infatuated with the granddaughter who wants to be a ballet dancer. The kitchen maid and the chauffeur are particularly prejudiced and say outrageously bigoted things.

The only other complication of the plot is that the princess makes a love potion which the journalist and the semi-ass bureaucrat drink and, for some time, are in the romantic pursuit of the Princess.

The solution: the earl and the butler are happy to go back to the Coconut Islands where war has been averted because of the alleged abduction of the Princess, where the butler will become prime minister and the earl will be content to be the butler!