The Boot Business is Personal

[setsuled]

1954's Hobson's Choice plays like an allegory of battling economic ideologies that goes well off the rails to make sense as such. The story is of a Falstaffian patriarch played by Charles Laughton who reigns over a bootshop peopled by his three daughters and two meek bootmakers who toil in the basement. He plans to marry off two of his daughters but finds the business sense of his eldest too useful to lose. He's therefore scandalised when she decides to marry one of those meek, but extraordinarily skilled, bootmakers in this very funny David Lean comedy.

Brenda De Banzie plays that daughter, Maggie, whom Laughton's Hobson delights in calling "past the marrying age". He's set up as such a ridiculous tyrant, spending most of his time sleeping or at the pub, that his troubles in the film are all the funnier because he can't see how richly he deserves them.



The bootmaker is played by John Mills as a thoroughly ignorant peon, toiling under the floorboards without a thought of bettering himself until Maggie decides to marry him as an apparently entirely business arrangement. She knows how skilled he is and how she can use him to make a new happy household. She does call it love.

The movie is consistently funny and sweet as the machinations of Hobson's daughters and his own intemperance force him to make further and further concessions. His alcoholism gives him some added trouble in a couple hilarious and fascinating scenes where he starts hallucinating.



I particularly liked this giant rat, tiny squeaks from which we hear before we can see the creature.

Hobson's Choice is available on The Criterion Channel.