I’ve decided that my favorite actress of the Sixties is Brenda DeBanzie. After I watched her steal the whole movie from that old mugger Charles Laughton in Hobson’s Choice, saw her in full bulldozer mode as a wronged wife in Too Many Crooks, and watched her put charm and grace into a routine second-banana role in Doctor at Sea, I went out looking for more DeBanzie movies.
And I ended up with A Pair of Briefs, a legal comedy made in 1962. DeBanzie plays a woman suing Ron Moody. She went missing after having lost her memory after a bombing incident in the War, but now she has her memory back and claims she’s Moody’s wife. Moody denies ever having met her, and in the unravelling of this tangled skein lie all sort of delights.
Our heroes are two likable and attractive young lawyers (Michael Craif and Mary Peach); their destiny is predictably to squabble and then fall in love. And there’s Moody’s vulgar girlfriend, played by Liz Fraser, who for once keeps her clothes on. And there’s an irascible but very clever judge (James Robertson Justice), who rules his courtroom with an iron hand. But the real delight is DeBanzie, as she plays an abandoned wife who wants her rights, but proves strangely evasive on the witness stand; even when playing dumb, there’re hints of an underlying intelligence which foreshadows the movie’s surprise ending.
And at the end, there’s twist after twist, all perfectly logical and delightful. I recommend it highly. My copy was a Region 2 PAL DVD, but Loving the Classics seems to have a Region 1 NTSC version.