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    • Source: Give Us the Moon

      • Give Us the Moon is a 1944 British comedy film directed and written by Val Guest and starring Vic Oliver, Margaret Lockwood and Peter Graves.
      Lockwood had just become a star with The Man in Grey and did the film because she did not want to be typecast as a villainess.


      Plot


      Made in 1943–44, the film is set in a future peacetime Britain, after the end of World War II. Peter Pyke, the son of a millionaire hotel owner, had been an RAF pilot during the war but, much to the frustration of his hard-working father, he does not want to work for a living, and idles his time away while living in his father's hotel (named "Eisenhower Hotel"). So when Peter stumbles across a group of people, mainly White Russian émigrés who call themselves “White Elephants” and refuse to work or be of any use to society, he eagerly accepts their invitation to join them.


      Cast


      Margaret Lockwood as Nina
      Vic Oliver as Sascha
      Peter Graves as Peter
      Roland Culver as Ferdinand
      Frank Cellier as Pyke
      Eliot Makeham as Lunka
      George Relph as Otto
      Max Bacon as Jacobus
      Alan Keith as Raphael
      Jean Simmons as Heidi
      John Salew as Landlord
      Iris Lang as Tania
      Gibb McLaughlin as Marcel
      Irene Handl as Miss Haddock


      Production


      The film is based on the 1939 novel The Elephant is White, written by Caryl Brahms and her Russian émigré writing partner S.J. Simon, but the story was moved from Paris in the 1930s to London in the late 1940s. Brahms and Simon provided additional dialogue to director Val Guest's screenplay.
      Val Guest said Lockwood "had been dying to do comedy and I had a big fight to get, even Ted, to get her to do" the film. "It was a great departure for her, it opened her up.... She had an enormous sense of fun, real lavatory laugh, raucous, and the ideal partner for her, and a real charmer, and I wrote him into every film I did as a juvenile lead was Peter Graves who had this great Niven-like quality, in fact he looked like Niven in those days, great throwaway charm and sophistication, so I wrote him into all those movies." Jean Simmons was cast in one of her first roles.
      The film came in under budget.


      Release


      The film opened at the New Gallery cinema in London on 31 July 1944, less than two months after D-Day and almost a year before the war would end in Europe. Film reviewers at the time were not very impressed. The Times reviewer found it to be "a film which opens well [but] ends not with the bang of vigorous cinematic invention but the whimper of overworked dialogue". However, more recently the film has been described by one reviewer as "one of the most delightful comedies ever made". Phil Hardy's The Aurum Film Encyclopedia classed the film as a utopian science fiction film but also claimed that "Vic Olivier" was the hotelier.
      Val Guest said "it wasn't a successful picture, perhaps too sophisticated for what they wanted, the whole idea of a club of people who didn't want to work, they became a club, a white elephant club, and were earning by their wits."


      References




      External links


      Give Us the Moon at IMDb
      Give Us the Moon at TCMDB

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