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QUIET WEDDING (Paramount-British, 1940) Directed by Anthony Asquith, with Margaret Lockwood, Derek Farr, Marjorie Fielding
Quiet Wedding came immediately after Freedom Radio, and two features (Cottage to Let and Uncensored) and two propaganda shorts before We Dive at Dawn. In a sense it was a follow-up to Asquith's 1939 stage-to-screen success French Without Tears, although that very funny comedy was massacred in this country by having its last third lopped off!
Based on a hugely successful London play, Quiet Wedding was an enormously popular movie, and a huge morale-booster in Britain in those days of the war. (It was actually released in early 1941.) It was a contemporary story, yet it was not about the war ... it reminded audiences that life could go on normally despite the war, and its glorification of the English rural way of life was a gentle propagandist reminder that this was one of the reasons that the war was being fought. Comedy was needed then, Margaret Lockwood was one of the most popular of the newer stars and it may have been a little overrated by the critics. But the public loved it, and it was reissued several times. It has virtually disappeared from view in Britain now, thanks...