Rent Touch and Go (1955)

A Troubled Heathcliff - Touch and Go review by CH

Considering the many pivotal moments determined in Touch and Go by black-furred Heathcliff, it is surprising that the cat who played him is not mentioned on the cast list. On the credits of course is the screenwriter William Rose who had envisaged that feline element. This year of 1955 was the same one that his The Ladykillers appeared - and has overshadowed this lighter comedy in which Boccherini plays no part though there is a good jazz moment with Kenny Baker.

The plot is simple. Frustrated at forty in a job with a design company which is oblivious to modern trends, Jack Hawkins chucks it in and determines to take his wife and reenage daughter to make a new start in Australia. That they qualify for an assisted passage is suprising, for they have a desirable house in Chelsea near the river. The timescale is compressed as they are soon ready to go (although the jewelry is not packed) and much happens a day or so before their departure, not least seeking a new home for Heathcliff who - cats know these things - makes a bolt for it and is saved from the river by an engineering student (John Fraser): he and the daughter (June Thorburn) become smitten, the thought of swift parting painful.

Even if the viewer does not feel any of the agony which many of the cast display at the thought of such transplantation, there is so much which is well done here that it makes for something agreeable - and one's only sadness is to learn that a decade later June Thorburn died, pregnant, with thirty-six others when a flight from Spain crashed into a flock of sheep on Blackdown Hill in Sussex.