It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The Holly and the Ivy is directed by George More O'Ferrall, has a screenplay by Anatole de Grunwald, is based on the play by Wynyard Browne and stars Celia Johnson, Ralph Richardson, Margaret Leighton, Denholm Elliot, Maureen Delany, Margaret Halstan, John Gregson and William Hartnell.Every year the Gregory family gather together for Christmas. This year when they do painful family secrets are revealed.Jenny Gregory (Celia Johnson)has devoted herself to caring for her ailing father, Rev. Martin Gregory(Ralph Richardson). In caring for her father any possibility of her own personal happiness is pushed to one side. Jenny is in love with David Paterson(John Gregson), the pair want to get married but Jenny won't allow someone else to look after her father.Jenny's sister Margaret(Margaret Leighton)is a glamorous woman and lives in London. David thinks her selfish and insists that she should take a turn looking after the sisters father. Margaret has three painful secrets that she has kept from everyone except her brother. Michael Gregory(Denholm Elliot)is a soldier and gets leave to attend his families Christmas party, he's carefree and a great deal of fun. Also invited to the party are two aunts, Lydia(Margaret Halstan) and Bridget(Maureen Delany)these two provide the films comic relief.The entire cast are very good and the film is one to warm your heart, at Christmas or at any other time of the year. As much as I liked the film, I thought that the reveal of the secrets came much too easily than they probably would in real life. Also I would have liked to have seen more discussion about them and seen a bit more focus on the impact they have on the family. The film ends on Christmas morning and I wish the film lasted longer so we could spend more time with the family and have the ending that we get a bit later, as is stands the ending is a bit too perfect and to easily arrived at in my opinion.Ralph Richardson in particular is excellent as the absent minded vicar who couldn't see his own children's pain when it was staring him in the face. Richardson is also very good considering he was quite young compared to his character and he plays a much older man very convincingly. Celia Johnson portrays Jenny's quiet dignity and self sacrifice well. Margaret Leighton is heartbreaking as the woman who acts tough but in reality is anything but.There's a small but memorable role for the first Doctor Who himself William Hartnell, he plays a terrifying Sergeant Major who causes trouble for Michael.This is a delightful film and is one that should be better known.

It's too bad that this film is unavailable in the United States. Many years ago it was given to me by a friend who taped it off some obscure broadcast station. I've shown it every year since and have never grown tired of it. There is much truth in this film, and all of its characters reveal something of themselves that we can all identify with. And what a cast-- Ralph Richardson, Celia Johnson, Margaret Leighton, Denholm Elliot, and Hugh Williams! Richardson's parson is one, regardless of one's faith, we would all love to know. And Johnson and Leighton display acting of the highest order. Elliot is superb as the restless son, and Williams as a world weary but understanding and compassionate friend of the family has never been better. This is a film that deserves wide attention and should be a Christmas staple. It is not only my favorite Christmas movie, but also one my ten favorite films of all time.

Though he wrote several plays and the screenplay for the David Lean version of Hobson's Choice Wynyard Browne's main claim to fame was that he was at Cambridge with Michael Redgrave. The Holly And The Ivy was arguably his most successful play and his adaptation for the screen reflects - despite some misguided 'opening out' - its peculiar 'English' quality. I haven't seen the play but I HAVE seen enough plays to make an educated guess that it was a one-set effort with Act One setting the scene, a parsonage/vicarage in rural Norfolk, and bringing in the family members piecemeal to celebrate Christmas with those members in turn bringing their emotional baggage. The patriarch, Ralph Richardson on top of his game, is a widower with three children, one, Celia Johnson, the stay-at-home devoted daughter prepared to sacrifice her own happiness to take care of the elderly clergyman, one, Margaret Leighton, a high-flying career woman in London, and one, Denholm Elliott, a callow youth doing his 'National Service' in the British army and these three are supplemented by two aunts, Maureen Delaney and Margaret Halston. Arguably Browne originally wrote a tight, well-made family drama which benefited from the one set but he - or the producer - has seen fit to introduce us to the children/aunts prior to their arrival for the Christmas celebrations which involved creating supplementary characters i.e., Elliott's superiors in the army who place him on a charge and grant him a pass for the holidays. That cavil to one side the bulk of the film is yet another cross between a time capsule and a valentine to an England long gone the way of the dinosaur except of course that in 1952 the England depicted still existed. Browne offers a basic conflict; Celia Johnson is in love with John Gregson who in turn has a job opportunity abroad. She would dearly love to go with him but feels unable to ask her successful sister to give up her career and return home - the aunts are themselves elderly and set in their ways and Mick (Elliott) is a non-starter. Someone has remarked on these boards that Celia Johnson is too old to play a thirty one year old and whilst that's probably - and certainly biologically - true she's such a fine actress that the gets away with it easily though she is hardly being extended here in which she basically reprises her Laura Jesson in 'Brief Encounter', in love with one man but bound to another, the difference being that in the former she was bound to a husband and here she is bound to a father. John Gregson, who plays her potential husband, was never much more than a personable leading man of the solid, dependable kind, the tweedy, pipe-smoking stock character so beloved of British dramatists and here he's required to do little more than offer his impression of a mahogany sideboard. Margaret Leighton turns in yet another variant of the beautiful ice-maiden longing to show her cuddly kitten side and it is her character - obliged to conceal an illegitimate child that today she would flaunt - that perhaps illustrates the gap between life half a century ago and today. Somehow it all comes together and makes for a warm, nostalgic viewing experience.

Until recently I had never heard of this little gem of British holiday sentiment. I heard someone call it the "Christmas movie for people who don't like Christmas movies" and the quest to find it was on.This is the story of a Christmas in which the emotionally wounded family of a Church of England clergyman come home and attempt to have a happy holiday. What happens is not your typical happy tearjerker, nor is it a Christmas nightmare. Its a reasonably realistic, as much as films of the time could be in 75 minutes, look at a family of emotional cripples as they all try to put their lives back on track. The ending while hopeful is far from certain, so much so that I cursed the fact that it didn't go on another five or six hours, my sole complaint about the film.A word of warning, don't abandon the film until you get to the end. I wasn't enraptured of the film for almost two thirds of its running time. I was interested in what was happening but I didn't know if I liked it, and then suddenly all of the pieces were in place and it became this charming atypical jewel of a movie.Forget Its a Wonderful Life, watch this instead, its so much more real.