Give Us the Moon

Give Us the Moon is a 1944 British comedy film directed and written by Val Guest and starring Vic Oliver, Margaret Lockwood and Peter Graves.

Give Us the Moon
Original British film poster
Directed by	Val Guest
Screenplay by	Val Guest
Based on	The Elephant is White by Caryl Brahms & S.J. Simon
Produced by	Edward Black
Starring	Margaret Lockwood Vic Oliver Roland Culver Peter Graves Jean Simmons
Cinematography	Phil Grindrod
Edited by	R. E. Dearing
Music by	Bob Busby
Production company	Gainsborough Pictures
Distributed by	General Film Distributors (UK)
Release date	31 July 1944 (1944-07-31) (UK)
Running time	95 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Budget	£69,000

Lockwood had just become a star with The Man in Grey and did the film because she did not want to be typecast as a villainess.

Plot

Made in 1943–44, the film is set in a future peacetime Britain, after the end of World War II. Peter Pyke, the son of a millionaire hotel owner, had been an RAF pilot during the war but, much to the frustration of his hard-working father, he does not want to work for a living, and idles his time away while living in his father's hotel (named "Eisenhower Hotel"). So when Peter stumbles across a group of people, mainly White Russian émigrés who call themselves “White Elephants” and refuse to work or be of any use to society, he eagerly accepts their invitation to join them.

Cast

• Margaret Lockwood as Nina
• Vic Oliver as Sascha
• Peter Graves as Peter
• Roland Culver as Ferdinand
• Frank Cellier as Pyke
• Eliot Makeham as Lunka
• George Relph as Otto
• Max Bacon as Jacobus
• Alan Keith as Raphael
• Jean Simmons as Heidi
• John Salew as Landlord
• Iris Lang as Tania
• Gibb McLaughlin as Marcel
• Irene Handl as Miss Haddock

Production

The film is based on the 1939 novel The Elephant is White, written by Caryl Brahms and her Russian émigré writing partner S.J. Simon, but the story was moved from Paris in the 1930s to London in the late 1940s. Brahms and Simon provided additional dialogue to director Val Guest's screenplay.

Val Guest said Lockwood "had been dying to do comedy and I had a big fight to get, even Ted, to get her to do" the film. "It was a great departure for her, it opened her up.... She had an enormous sense of fun, real lavatory laugh, raucous, and the ideal partner for her, and a real charmer, and I wrote him into every film I did as a juvenile lead was Peter Graves who had this great Niven-like quality, in fact he looked like Niven in those days, great throwaway charm and sophistication, so I wrote him into all those movies." Jean Simmons was cast in one of her first roles.

The film came in under budget.

Release

The film opened at the New Gallery cinema in London on 31 July 1944, less than two months after D-Day and almost a year before the war would end in Europe. Film reviewers at the time were not very impressed. The Times reviewer found it to be "a film which opens well [but] ends not with the bang of vigorous cinematic invention but the whimper of overworked dialogue". However, more recently the film has been described by one reviewer as "one of the most delightful comedies ever made". Phil Hardy's The Aurum Film Encyclopedia classed the film as a utopian science fiction film but also claimed that "Vic Olivier" was the hotelier.

Val Guest said "it wasn't a successful picture, perhaps too sophisticated for what they wanted, the whole idea of a club of people who didn't want to work, they became a club, a white elephant club, and were earning by their wits."

External links

• Give Us the Moon at IMDb
• Give Us the Moon at TCMDB