Always a Bride (1953)

Director: Ralph Smart
Writers: Ralph Smart and Peter Jones
Stars: Peggy Cummins, Terence Morgan and Ronald Squire

Index: 2025 Centennials.

While this is a sedate British comedy about gentlemanly crooks plying their trade on the French Riviera, it unfolds against a historical backdrop that sent me down a rabbit hole and I wish the filmmakers had explored it deeper.

As we begin, our focus is on Terence Winch, who’s trying to change his hotel room without luck. We soon learn that the hotel is trying to subtly pressure him into to leaving because he intimidates their guests. It’s because his job is literally to stop them spending money.

And, because that seems to make absolutely no sense at all, I need to explain. He’s an agent of the British Treasury enforcing UK exchange controls that were designed during World War II to avoid a run on the pound and to ensure a steady flow of foreign imports. Sounds crucial, doesn’t it? Well, it probably was in 1939 during wartime but the law lingered on for decades.

What it meant to folk was an overseas travel allowance that, for most of the fifties, was £25 per year. It only applied if you left the sterling zone, i.e. nations not using the pound, but that included the entire continent of Europe. It had little impact on a family on a summer holiday, but it was a huge limitation to anyone hanging out on, say, the French Riviera.

Therefore Terence Winch is very unpopular in Monte Carlo with both British tourists and anyone dependent on tourists spending just as much money as they want. Also therefore, the bulk of the Brits we meet are crooks, including all the other leads.

Enter Victor Hemsley and his young bride to be, Clare. The hotel is a little shocked, as she’s strikingly younger than he is. Victor is Ronald Squire, a delightful character actor only three years shy of seventy. Clare, on the other hand, is Peggy Cummins, our centenarian, who was a mere twenty-eight. It’s almost a stretch for us to believe that she’s really his daughter, as she could easily have been his granddaughter.

They’re here to pull a scam. He hangs out in the hotel’s bar prominently drinking with the other male guests, while she waits forlornly on her own, building the ladies’ sympathies, who naturally see it as disgraceful behaviour. “Old reprobate!” they mutter. “Poor innocent girl!”

And then, after he’s written a note to leave on her pillow and slipped away down the fire escape, she’ll wake up and discover him gone. The ladies drum up a collection to surprise her with and off she’ll go, agreeably thankful, and pull the same scam somewhere else.

Now, Victor is an old hand at this. He had a different partner, but she married a Texan oil baron and left the game, so it’s Clare’s turn. He has every confidence in her but she’s scared of doing it well and falling for the life a lot more than failing at the task.

And, if you haven’t already figured out how these two strands are going to connect, Winch sees a lady in need and steps up to the plate as a gentleman should and, well, nature takes its course. He falls for her, which we can believe, and she falls for him, which we must question.

Much of the fun here is watching her seduce him, then push him away, because, well, she really shouldn’t, not so soon, yaddah yaddah. Effectively, we’re watching an actress playing an actress, so we wonder how much is genuine feeling and how much is a crook dangling her mark on a string.

Eventually, of course, she leaves because it’s important to have an exit plan that avoids any overstaying of welcomes, and then the story is really in motion, because Winch isn’t ready to let go of the idea of Clare quite yet.

What happens after that, you’ll need to see Always a Bride yourself to find out. What I’ll say is that there’s a lot more to come. Some of it is clever stuff, given life with sparkling dialogue, such as “There’s nothing I wouldn’t stoop to to gain back my self respect.” Some of it is more routine, but it’s all worthy. The script was by Ralph Smart, who later created the TV show Danger Man, and Peter Jones, the Book in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show.

It’s joy to see a veteran character actor like Ronald Squire in a prominent role, getting up to all sorts of no good with vibrant enthusiasm and an agreeably British sense of decorum. He is really the driving force of this film and he carries it wonderfully, though ably assisted by Marie Lohr and Geoffrey Sumner.

Clare only has one foot in that world, so she offers a broader range to Peggy Cummins, who would be a delight either as an honest woman or as a crook. Terence Morgan is decent as her romantic lead, but Winch has far less depth to explore and the film sadly forgets his job. That I wanted to learn a lot more about!

Fortunately, I’m watching this for her, as I’d already covered her most famous picture, Gun Crazy, for her co-star John Dall. While that’s a better film, this is a lot more fun.

She was an Irish actress, albeit one born in Wales during a storm that stopped her visiting parents from getting home to Dublin. She was born Augusta Fuller, known as Peggy because her second name was Margaret. Cummins was her mother’s maiden name, though her stage name was Margaret Tracy.

She studied ballet as a child but found roles in plays, debuting in London on her thirteenth birthday. That led her to film and Dr. O’Dowd at the age of fifteen, a lost film that’s one of the BFI’s 75 Most Wanted. She made other British films, but it was a West End play, Junior Miss, in 1943 that launched her career. Darryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, was studying British propaganda films in London, saw the play and asked her to come to Hollywood.

She was initially cast in Cluny Brown, though her role eventually went to Helen Walker. She appeared in The Late George Apley and was top billed in Moss Rose above Victor Mature, Ethel Barrymore and Vincent Price. Zanuck wanted her for Forever Amber and she shot half the film but new director Otto Preminger replaced her with Linda Darnell. Hollywood wasn’t to be.

After Escape and Green Grass of Wyoming, she returned to the UK for That Dangerous Age, but made one more picture in Hollywood, the one for which she’s most remembered, Gun Crazy, a noted precursor to Bonnie and Clyde.

The rest of her career was spent in the UK, making films opposite names like David Niven, Dana Andrews and Edward G. Robinson. Best known of her British work today is the horror film Night of the Demon, but Street Corner, Meet Mr. Lucifer and Hell Drivers are also notable. She retired in 1961 but made some appearances in later years. She died in 2017 at ninety-two.