The Smallest Show on Earth

Jean and Bill, struggling to get by, receive a telegram telling them they have inherited something from an uncle they never knew. The inheritance is a cinema in the town of Sloughborough. The couple set off hoping to sell it and be comfortable. What they find on arrival is a building beside a railway line, shaken every time a train goes past, close to falling down, with three elderly staff who have worked there for years still inside. It is one of the best-liked English comedies and its real strength is those three: Margaret Rutherford in the box office, Bernard Miles on the door and Peter Sellers in the projection room. None of them wants to give the place up, because it is their life. While the film runs as a comedy about saving something, it is also describing how cinemas themselves were beginning to close; at the end of the fifties the small halls were shutting one after another. Basil Dearden uses the humour without turning it cruel and without softening it either.