Synopsis
A farmer becomes an unintentional celebrity when, because of a strike, he has to walk his 5000 geese 100 miles to market.
Laughterhouse
1984 Directed by Richard Eyre
Cast
Ian Holm Penelope Wilton Bill Owen Richard Hope Stephen Moore Rosemary Martin Patrick Drury Aran Bell Stephanie Tague C.J. Allen Norman Fisher Claire Laine Denise Summers Kenneth MacDonald Barbara Burgess Ben Wright Tim Seely Johnny Golde Stephen Phillips Gillian Barge Steve Vickers Tim Stern Ken Ives Patrick Connor Tommy Wright Dave Atkins Eric Richard Pearl Hackney Kevin Allen Show All…
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Releases by Date
Premiere
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Italy
Venice Film Festival
01 Oct 1985
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USA
Chicago International Film Festival
Releases by Country
Italy
01 Sep 1984
- Premiere Venice Film Festival
USA
01 Oct 1985
- Premiere Chicago International Film Festival
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A potentially engaging situation - herding a gaggle of geese from Norfolk to London - is floored by practically zero character building or skill for storytelling. An ugly mess from the off.
Opportunities are wasted - or not even addressed - in a flitting series of brief adversities (the obligatory punctured tyre not least of them). Glover’s miserable gadfly script is all over the place and Eyre elicits minimal empathy from a skilled cast. The lack of sentimentality is welcome; the lack of anything else is not.
It may have been derived from Red River (hence the extraneous Western-themed music) but The Titfield Thunderbolt did this sort of thing so much better.
I may as well say it: a wild goose chase…
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Laughterhouse (or Singleton's Pluck as it is also known by) is a 1984 feature film directed by Richard Eyre, from a screenplay by wrestler-turned-actor Brian Glover. It stars Ian Holm as Norfolk goose farmer Ben Singleton who incurs the wrath of the union (the TGWU to be precise) when one of his pluckers loses a finger in an industrial accident. With his farm effectively off limits for workers, a beleaguered Singleton finds that he has no transport to take his geese to London's Smithfield market in time for the lucrative Christmas season. Determined not to miss the opportunity, he persuades his wife Alice (Penelope Wilton), daughter Emma (Stephanie Tague) and a pair of farmhands - the cantankerous old Amos (Bill…
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The obvious comparison for any small scale British movie in which the little man pits himself against the powers that be is Ealing, obviously, and that was presumably writer Brian Glover's inspiration, but there are also echoes of the great Will Hay, with Holm as Will and Hope and Owen in the Moffatt and Marriot roles.
The title 'Laughterhouse' potentially adds to the comparison but to be honest it's a terrible name - the play on slaughterhuse is rubbish, there's barely a slaughterhouse in the film and it's not actually all that funny, really.
What it is, however, is surprisingly nuanced, with Holm and his wife (played by Penelope Wilton, in almost the exact same role as she plays in…
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No it is not just Ian Holm going: "My... precious...HAAAAA..." over his geese while traversing the English landscape of the '80s. In contrast to the distain J.R.R Tolkien had for modernisation and in particular industrialisation, Ben Singleton has other motives to shun the 'newly' acquired technology that would have made his trip much easier, namely nasty labour unions that seemingly blame business owners for all the problems and accidents that occur. In that way the conservative overtone of Laughterhouse is filled not with sentimentality as it was in Lord of the Rings, but with political discourse not uncommon in the mudslinging culture of the contemporary English political climate.
All I am saying is that Margaret Tatcher, who was the prime…
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Laughterhouse (1983) - Twee, sub-Ealing Film4 starring Ian Holm and Penelope Wilton as farmers.