One of the truly unique characters in British cinema, Old Mother Riley was the creation of actor Arthur Lucan, who spent five decades on the stage and in films, dressed in women’s clothing. Although some consider Lucan/Old Mother Riley part of the “pantomime dame” tradition of female impersonation, there is never any overt hint of “camp” in the Riley films with regards to the character’s sex—indeed, I’ve always been convinced that an uninformed spectator would never suspect Old Mother Riley was being played by a male actor, the illusion was simply that good.
Still, Old Mother Riley is an acquired taste, largely limited to a certain demographic—although extremely popular in the UK in the 1940s and 1950s, the only Riley film known internationally is the last, Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952), and that because of the presence of Bela Lugosi. The previous 16 films (although two of these were not, strictly speaking “Old Mother Riley” vehicles) might as well not exist for anyone outside of the British Isles and anyone under 50 (or 60?) years of age.
Old Mother Riley in Society is in many ways an atypical Mother Riley film (I’ve seen all the Riley films but two, Old Mother Riley and Old Mother Riley in Business, which seem to be currently unavailable). Based on a story by Kitty McShane, Arthur Lucan’s real-life wife and on-screen daughter, the picture is chiefly a mother-daughter melodrama akin to Madame X and Imitation of Life, with Mother Riley sacrificing her happiness so her daughter can successfully “pass” in high society. Although this makes the film a rather inaccurate introduction to the Old Mother Riley oeuvre, it bears closer examination and has a number of fascinating aspects.
However, first, a brief synopsis. Mother Riley does hand laundry for the dancers working in a panto version of “Aladdin,” where her daughter Kitty (for some reason named “Kitty Collins” rather than “Kitty Riley”) is herself a member of the chorus. Trying to sneak a peek at the show after delivering the laundry, Mother Riley accidentally pops up through a trap door and arrives on stage. Accosted by the irate star, Mother Riley’s belligerent responses have the audience laughing uproariously. This doesn’t please the leading actress, who walks out, leaving Kitty to substitute, with great success. After the show, Kitty is congratulated by wealthy Tony Morgan, and they eventually fall in love. Mother Riley, although upset at first, realises the couple is in love; to spare her daughter any embarassment, she professes to be Kitty’s “dresser.”
Tony and Kitty marry and move into his family’s mansion, employing Mother Riley as Kitty’s personal maid. However, during a fancy party to introduce Tony’s new wife to his upper-class friends, rumours of Kitty’s former stage career begin to circulate. Kitty prepares to confess her past, but Mother Riley—fearing this will adversely affect her daughter’s social standing—causes a disruption, then leaves a farewell note and vanishes. Kitty tells her husband the truth, and a detective is engaged to find Mother Riley, without success (it is at this point we learn—from a newspaper advert placed by the detective—that Mother Riley was born in Liverpool). Mother Riley holds (and loses) a variety of jobs after separating from Kitty, and is finally reduced to living in a shabby hostel and picking up casual work in the Hotel Metropole as a dishwasher. A chance encounter with old friend Tug Mulligan results in her reunion with Kitty; Tony’s family explains they’re not “high society” after all, merely nouveau riche, and now Mother Riley can share in the largesse.
While there are a few sequences of familiar Mother Riley comic wordplay and physical humour, most of Old Mother Riley in Society is mawkishly sentimental melodrama. It’s sincere enough, but not exactly what one expects from an Old Mother Riley picture.
In exchange, we’re presented with a fascinating socio-economic document. The upper class lives a life of conspicuous consumption, eating in fancy restaurants, vacationing in Monte Carlo, throwing fabulous parties (complete with orchestra and chorus line), living in mansions, employing a regiment of servants. The working class stay in shabby flats or hostels, get drunk in pubs and brawl in the street, are stuck in dead-end jobs (when they can get work at all), and often go hungry (one effective, even touching bit early in the film has Mother Riley purchasing “four penny’s worth of chips” for Kitty to eat “all by herself” as a treat). The latter third of the film is nightmarish, as an unemployed and desperate Mother Riley winds up in a shabby doss house with a group of other women who’ve hit the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder (to be fair, they’re poor but not down-hearted, and there is a palpable sense of community among the group).
A familiar trope in comedy films has the protagonist working different jobs and losing them all for “funny” reasons (think of the Three Stooges or even Chaplin in Modern Times), but Old Mother Riley in Society fails to elicit much humour from this hoary plot device. She is fired from a laundry for taking clothes from rich clients and putting them in the bundles of the working poor; this dismissal prevents her from breaking her own record of holding a job longer than three weeks! Hired as a housekeeper under false pretenses (the woman didn’t indicate there were numerous children to care for), an exhausted Mother Riley (who says “it was such a long walk from the station”) accepts the position since she has no other choice. Later, she surreptitiously wraps up a piece of chicken left on a plate at the Hotel Metropole, taking it home for her own supper: this scene simultaneously criticises those who can afford to waste expensive food, and serves to indicate the depths of poverty to which Mother Riley has sunk. Towards the end of the film, a physically weakened Mother Riley is shown to be increasingly depressed at her inability to find and keep a job, and literally collapses in the arms of old friend Tug.
Curiously, despite the portrayal of obvious inequities between rich and poor, the film doesn’t show the rich in an especially unflattering light. Mother Riley is rightly fired for “stealing” laundry (the fact that she was giving it to the less fortunate doesn’t change the illegality of her actions) and her supervisor, while stern, is not depicted as unjust. Sir John and his wife (Tony’s parents) are friendly enough and—as is revealed at the conclusion—earned their fortune “in sausages,” so they’re just plain folk after all. Even Tony’s upper-class friends welcome Kitty into their midst, with the possible exception of one young woman whose motive appears to be jealousy.
What emerges then is a peculiar portrait of a severely stratified society with the very rich and the working poor at opposite ends of the economic spectrum (and only a few individuals sprinkled in between), but no oppressors or oppressed. The only “oppressors” we see are the “Aladdin” star, whose dresser bemoans her demanding ways, and pompous butler Nugent, who runs the staff at the Morgan mansion with an iron hand. Ironically, neither character is upper-class, and both are portrayed as unpleasant individuals, so their treatment of subordinates is a function of their personality rather than their class (similarly, one of the chorus girls makes a disparaging remark about Kitty being the daughter of a laundress, but only after Mother Riley alludes to her mother being a charwoman). Furthermore, at least one sequence features a rather surprising, upbeat depiction of work: the aptly-named “Sunshine Laundry” plays peppy music to enliven the drudgery of its employees’ labours, the facility is clean and well-lit, and the workers appear content with their lot.
Despite the divergent images of rich and poor in Old Mother Riley in Society, the film contains little overt social commentary—Mother Riley distrusts Tony Morgan not because he’s upper-class, but because she fears he’s a “Stage Door Johnny” (which he is, although his intentions turn out to be honourable after all). The sequence in the “Sunshine Laundry” veers a little close to socialism, as Mother Riley does her bit towards redistribution of wealth (or, at least, clothing) by taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Late in the film, at her lowest point, Mother Riley reads the help-wanted ads in a newspaper and mumbles to herself, complaining that employers only want to hire young people—this could be construed as decrying the unfairness of the capitalist system, which discards workers when they are too old to be productive, but in fact it seems more like a rant against age-ism.
The title of the film is rather misleading, since at no time is Mother Riley actually “in society” (the title suggests a scenario where she inherits a title or wins a fortune in the lottery, thus elevating her socio-economic status, which is not the case at all). Kitty is the one who “marries up”—Mother Riley, even when living in the Morgan mansion, is still a member of the working class, posing as her daughter’s maid, living in the servants’ quarters, taking orders (with ill grace) from the butler, and so on. There’s no “Beverly Hillbillies” culture clash here, at least not on a grand scale: in one amusing scene, she’s ordered to serve tea to Lady Morgan, and mistakenly believe she’s been invited to have tea. “There’s only one teacup,” Mother Riley observes. “When are you going to have [your] tea?” “Right now,” Lady Morgan replies, and Mother Riley finally gets it—she’s a servant now, and she’s doesn’t get to have tea with the mistress of the house (though she winds up drinking most of it anyway).
In addition to the film’s implicit discussion of class and economic differences in the UK, circa 1940, there are several other points of interest in Old Mother Riley in Society. Some of these, such as allusions to World War Two, are conspicuous by their absence.
The almost total lack of topical references is unusual in a British film of this era. The picture’s release date was July 1940, suggesting it was produced during the “Phoney War” period between the initial Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the subsequent attacks on Belgium and the Netherlands in May 1940. The two previous Mother Riley movies—Old Mother Riley M.P. and Old Mother Riley Joins Up—both contained references to the world crisis and a number of subsequent Mother Riley films would also have war-related content. Old Mother Riley in Society not only omits almost any references to contemporary events, it goes out of its way to depict conspicuous consumption (Kitty and her husband spend their honeymoon in Monte Carlo, for example) and “life as usual” in England, for both the upper class and the working class. There aren’t even any visual hints that Britain was at war: no uniformed characters are visible in crowd scenes, no one carries a gas mask case (and both of these would have been very prevalent in 1940 England in real life), and so on.
There are two brief dialogue hints that the UK was at war—early in the film, Mother Riley makes a “blackout” joke; she later says her son-in-law weighed more than Kitty did at birth because “he was pre-war; don’t forget, we were rationed after that.” There is also what seems to be an oblique reference to the evacuation of children from England’s cities to the countryside (some were even sent overseas): Mother Riley gets a job as a housekeeper for a woman who says a some children are “merely staying with us temporarily” (Riley is shocked to discover at least half a dozen youngsters will be in her care). Finally, in an early scene Mother Riley tells the theatre’s stage manager—who has admonished her for being late with the laundry—“now don’t start, we’ve got enough people making trouble in the world without you,” which could be construed as a topical reference.
Old Mother Riley in Society also features that staple of wartime British cinema, abundant cheesecake. This may seem counter-intuitive, particularly in a rather mawkish melodrama, but in fact a large number of films from this era (in all genres) contain somewhat incongruous cheesecake sequences (often musical numbers). OMR in Society features scantily-clad women in a theatrical dressing room and backstage, as well as various voluptuous women in the onstage panto version of “Aladdin” (including the “principal boy”—played, as usual, by an attractive young woman in an abbreviated costume). Later, a bevy of dancers do a mass striptease as part of a musical interlude at a lavish society party.
Despite the frequent (and generally accurate) characterisation of the Old Mother Riley series as “B films,” the production values of Old Mother Riley in Society are not bad at all. There are some spacious sets, large numbers of extras in several scenes, and two musical sequences with relatively lavish production values. Lucan’s performance is more sentimental and less manic than usual as Mother Riley, while “dotter Kitty” McShane is…adequate…delivering her lines with her standard lack of inflection, a petulant look on her face. The rest of the cast is satisfactory, with a few familiar faces sprinkled throughout: although the Mother Riley films weren’t havens for guest stars, people like Martita Hunt, John Longden, Sebastian Cabot, Peggy Cummins, John Laurie, etc., appeared in the odd entry or two.
Old Mother Riley in Society is available on YouTube; the video quality is rather poor, but it’s watchable and since this is a fairly rare film, any version will have to suffice. As noted at the outset of this article, I can’t recommend the film as representative of the Mother Riley films as a whole, but it has its own attractions.
[A temporary dearth of new releases prompted me to upload this commentary. We should be back to reviews of “new stuff” soon. I’m looking forward to Hugo, among other films.]
