The Galloping Major
It’s an unlikely partnership brought about by happenstance, debt collector Harold Temple arriving at the pet shop owned by Major Arthur Hill over a default of £34, 7/8 which he is unable to repay due to a gambling problem, their discussion leading to the improbably idea that one lucky win on the horses might be enough not only to clear the debt but turn a tidy profit, but which of the candidates will it be, Montana Miss or Irish Jig?
Fortunately the decision is correct, and Montana Miss not only wins but is soon to be up for auction, but how could such humble men ever afford the £300 required to bid for a racehorse? Major Hill’s daughter Susan has the idea, inspired by the efforts of her schoolfriends to collectively buy a bicycle, and a syndicate is formed in Lamb’s Green to buy the guaranteed winner – except arriving moments too late, Hill and Temple instead buy the less-than-promising Father’s Folly, soon renamed the Galloping Major.
The cast led by Basil Radford, one half of The Lady Vanishes’ detective duo Charters and Caldicott, it was he who presented the idea to I Am a Camera director Henry Cornelius and Whisky Galore! writer Monja Danischewsky, the star, director and producer eventually sharing the credit for the screenplay of The Galloping Major which itself took its name from the 1906 song written by Fred W Leigh and George Bastow which is performed within the film.
Released in the summer of 1951 and largely set around the fictitious burgh of Lamb’s Green, London NW3, though an independent production The Galloping Major is similar to the films produced by Ealing Studios around the same era, particularly Cornelius’ own Passport to Pimlico, both featuring a suburb of London finding itself in a unique situation and the community responding in a contrarian but ambitious fashion and coping as best they can with the obstacles which inevitably present themselves.
In some ways less interesting for what it shows than what it represents, the aspirations of the working-class in post-war London who embrace what could almost be seen as communism, the collective ownership of a object normally seen as the province solely of the wealthy, The Galloping Major is both very silly and very English, the ensemble bolstered by Hugh Griffith, Charles Hawtrey, Sid James, Joyce Grenfell and a pre-Triffid Janette Scott.
Restored and released as part of StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics range, the new edition features extensive insight from Matthew Sweet into the production and reception of the film, ironically funded piecemeal as befits the plot and a last hurrah for veteran actor Radford who died the following year, and an exploration of the locations by Richard Dacre, many of them around Belsize Park and easily recognisable even after seventy years.
