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As Good As It Gets

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The first must-see film of the year.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

The Drummer in the Ballroom scenes ........is that Spike Milligan ?

A portmanteau movie centred round the Huggett family deeply rooted in working - class culture,decent,God - fearing,patriotic,proud of their place in society and secure and optimistic about the future for both themselves and their country.60 years later their descendants,hedonistic alcohol - fuelled,violent,stain their country's reputation in countries their great grandfathers helped to free from the very sort of nihilism they display.Thanks to six decades of Social Progress, the Huggetts and their beliefs have become the stuff of satire.Those terribly clever Monty Python chappies started it with their "funny" knotted handkerchief and sleeveless pully wearing drones and now everything the Huggetts would have held dear is held to ridicule. "Holiday Camp" gives you a chance to redress the balance.It features the wonderful Mr Jack Warner as the paterfamilias,sports jacket,open - necked shirt,pens in his top pocket,he is 1940 - 50s man made carnate.Miss K.Harrison displays all the strength she would have needed in the absence of a husband to have kept the family together during the recently - ended war. The Holiday Camp was many a British teenager's first taste of relative freedom and I have fond memories of my first visit in 1952 when my parents would go off the shows and leave me to my own devices.Magic days indeed. Watching "Holiday Camp" may be a bit like looking through your grandparents' snap album,but as time passes inexorably and history is re -written,like your grandparents' snap album it will become a true record of the way we were rather than the way the social engineers wish to portray us.

Last time I saw this was 1972 and it was dated badly even by then, now it might as well portray life on another planet. A planet that is very appealing! The British working class long ago got more spare cash in their pockets to skedaddle off to more distant sunnier shores for their 2 weeks a year. Instead back then they had 1 week in an enormous regimented boot camp under dull skies, packed like sardines into shared chalets. Every picture frame must have at least 20 people in it.The first Huggetts film has the family off to Farleigh Holiday Camp, where various little stories unfold about the guests good bad and sad, a more down to Earth Grand Hotel if you like. Jack Warner as Dad and Kathleen Harrison as Ma (who definitely hadn't got 8 eyes like an octopus) were perfectly ordinary straight folk with no side with 2 grown up kids - decidedly, in Hazel Court's case - all of them excellent and stereotypical role models for the viewers. And what's wrong with that in these days where only the seedy and vicious are held in esteem in movies? Jimmy Hanley was an ideal beau for the daughter, young War widow Huggett, an uncomplicated young man bent on pleasure but straight as a die. Unsurprisingly Good won out in all the threads, although in Dennis Price's and Esme Cannon's case it was a melancholic and ambiguously puzzling end.It was filmed in the hellishly cold (Warner's words) studio at Lime Grove during the big freeze of '47, something to bear in mind when watching everyone sunning themselves. For a glimpse into a totally dead Britain, unbeatable. Also an entertaining 94 minutes for those like me who aren't serious or researching for their University dissertations about life in post-War Britain.

This is one of my favourite films, I first saw it when I was about 18. It reminds me of when I was young and used to go on holidays with my family. ( Not that I was around in the war, I'm to young ). Jack Warner is brilliant in it and so are the other cast members.It's about what family's should be like. The plot of the film is, Joe Huggett and his family go to an holiday camp for a week, while they are there is a murderer is on the loose, a teenage girl is on the run with her boyfriend and finds out she is going to have a baby and she is only 15, quite scandalous in those days. All in all this is a great film, the cast are great, and it's a feel good film, it should be released on DVD.