ianlouisiana Review of The Family Way

The Family Way (1966)

The course of true love never did run smooth.

[9/10 · 14 November 2005]

Forget the smoke and mirrors of "Ryan's Daughter",this is John Mills' best performance.There is real depth in Bill Naughton's script and Mr Mills brings it all out.No longer the perky cockney other-rank or the clipped-voice officer Mr Mills goes up a gear to produce a creation J.B.Priestley would have been proud of.The film takes rather less than two hours to tell a story that a TV soap would string out for six months. Sexually dysfunctional husbands were not common currency in 1967 and "The Family Way" was rather daring for bringing them out of the closet,so to speak.Hywel Bennet and Hayley Mills exemplify the optimism and resilience of youth on the cusp of the swinging sixties,and you hope that they will make a proper "go" of their marriage after its rather unfortunate start. With her vast experience of similar roles Marjorie Rhodes could have phoned her performance in,instead she invests her part with love and care the way only a very considerable artist can. Considered basically as a "sex comedy" in its day"The Family Way" is overdue a critical revision.As a look at working-class life it lacks the cynicism of John Braine ,the polemic of Alan Sillitoe and the rose-coloured sentimentalism of Alan Bennett.I cared about these people. They weren't the victims of beastly southern mill owners,intellectuals deprived of their rightful place in North London by a conspiracy of jessies from the Camden Town triangle,or slightly strange middle aged persons living at home with their widowed mothers,they were - in common with 99% of the rest of us - ordinary people just trying to make the best of what life comes up with.I urge you to seek this one out,you won't forget it n a hurry.