Rick's Flicks: Passport to Pimlico

Steyn On-Line ^ | July 1, 2023 | Rick McGinnis

[Twotone]

...We're in London during a summer heatwave and the residents of Pimlico are beset by the heat as well as the straitened circumstances of postwar life. We meet PC Spiller (Philip Stainton), the local plod, bank branch manager Wix (Raymond Untley) – the man in the linen suit – and the sunbathing young lady: Molly Reed (Jane Hylton), who works for Huggins, the fishmonger. Other local merchants include the ironmonger Pemberton (Stanley Holloway), his commonsensical wife Connie (Betty Warren), their pretty daughter Shirley (Barbara Murray), and dress shop owner Edie Randall (Hermione Baddeley).

In addition to rationing and the heat, Wix is being thwarted by his small-minded regional manager, Huggins is carrying a flame for Shirley while oblivious to the attentions of Molly, and Pemberton is at loggerheads with the local council over a park and swimming pool he wants to build on part of the neighbourhood's ample cleared bombsites; they tell him they're in "no position to finance daydreams." Pimlico is also host to one of the last unexploded bombs in the city, which is detonated ahead of schedule by a group of boys who roll a huge wooden reel into the hole left by sappers.

Pemberton accidentally falls into the crater and discovers a hidden chamber deep below the ground –all that remains of a mansion that once sat on the site, and filled with treasure that Wix dutifully locks in the bank's vault. A portrait and a parchment reveal it to be the property of an exiled Burgundian Duke whose estate was declared foreign soil by Edward IV...