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A Soldier For Christmas
''A Soldier for Christmas'' is a 1944 comedy play by the British actor and playwright Reginald Beckwith. It was staged twice in London's West End that year. Between 3 February and 22 April it ran at Wyndham's Theatre before transferring to the Vaudeville Theatre where it continued between 25 April and 8 July, running for a total of 181 performances. It was then revived and ran for a further 34 performances at the Playhouse Theatre between 6 October and 4 November 1944. The West End cast included Trevor Howard, Robert Beatty, Joyce Barbour, Joan Harben and Jane Cain. Synopsis Mrs Ferguson issues an invitation to a local Canadian Army base for one of the soldiers to spend Christmas with them. When he arrives he finds the house overwhelmed with the emotional issues of both of the Ferguson's daughters, plus a WAAF girl who has been billeted A billet is a living-quarters to which a soldier is assigned to sleep. Historically, a billet was a private dwelling that was requ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reginald Beckwith
William Reginald Beckwith (2 November 190826 June 1965) was an English film and television actor, who made over one hundred film and television appearances in his career. He died of a heart attack aged 56. Beckwith was also a film critic and playwright before the war, and from 1941–45, was a BBC war correspondent. His play '' Boys in Brown'' was filmed in 1949, and he co-wrote the film ''You're Only Young Twice'' in 1952, based on James Bridie's play. Selected filmography * ''Freedom Radio'' (1941) as Emil Fenner * '' My Brother's Keeper'' (1948) as 1st Barber (uncredited) * ''Scott of the Antarctic'' (1948) as Bowers / Lt. H.R. Bowers R.I.M. * '' Miss Pilgrim's Progress'' (1949) as Mr. Jenkins * ''The Body Said No!'' (1950) as Benton * ''Mister Drake's Duck'' (1951) as Mr. Boothby * ''Circle of Danger'' (1951) as Oliver * ''Another Man's Poison'' (1951) as Mr. Bigley * ''Whispering Smith Hits London'' (1952) as Manson * ''Brandy for the Parson'' (1952) as Scout Master ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Canadian Army
The Canadian Army (french: Armée canadienne) is the command responsible for the operational readiness of the conventional ground forces of the Canadian Armed Forces. It maintains regular forces units at bases across Canada, and is also responsible for the Army Reserve, the largest component of the Primary Reserve. The Army is headed by the concurrently held Commander of the Canadian Army and Chief of the Army Staff, who is subordinate to the Chief of the Defence Staff. The Army is also supported by 3,000 civilian employees from the civil service. Formed in 1855, as the Active Militia, in response to the threat of the United States to the Province of Canada after the British Garrison left for the Crimean War. This Militia was later split into the Permanent Active Militia and the Non-Permanent Active Militia. Finally, in 1940, an Order in Council was issued to rename the active militias to the Canadian Army. On 1 April 1966, prior to the unification of the Canadian Armed For ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comedy Plays
Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. The term originated in ancient Greece: in Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by political satire performed by comic poets in theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance pitting two groups, ages, genders, or societies against each other in an amusing '' agon'' or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old". A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions posing obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth then becomes constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to resort to ruses wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
West End Plays
West or Occident is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sun sets on the Earth. Etymology The word "west" is a Germanic word passed into some Romance languages (''ouest'' in French, ''oest'' in Catalan, ''ovest'' in Italian, ''oeste'' in Spanish and Portuguese). As in other languages, the word formation stems from the fact that west is the direction of the setting sun in the evening: 'west' derives from the Indo-European root ''*wes'' reduced from ''*wes-pero'' 'evening, night', cognate with Ancient Greek ἕσπερος hesperos 'evening; evening star; western' and Latin vesper 'evening; west'. Examples of the same formation in other languages include Latin occidens 'west' from occidō 'to go down, to set' and Hebrew מַעֲרָב maarav 'west' from עֶרֶב erev 'evening'. Navigation To go west using a compass for navigation (in a place where magnetic north is the same dire ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1944 Plays
Events Below, the events of World War II have the "WWII" prefix. January * January 2 – WWII: ** Free France, Free French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny is appointed to command First Army (France), French Army B, part of the Sixth United States Army Group in North Africa. ** Landing at Saidor: 13,000 US and Australian troops land on Papua New Guinea, in an attempt to cut off a Japanese retreat. * January 8 – WWII: Philippine Commonwealth troops enter the province of Ilocos Sur in northern Luzon and attack Japanese forces. * January 11 ** President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt proposes a Second Bill of Rights for social and economic security, in his State of the Union address. ** The Nazi German administration expands Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp into the larger standalone ''Konzentrationslager Plaszow bei Krakau'' in occupied Poland. * January 12 – WWII: Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle begin a 2-day conference in Marrakech ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glynis Johns
Glynis Margaret Payne Johns (born 5 October 1923) is a South African-born British former actress, dancer, musician and singer. Recognised as a film and Broadway icon, Johns has a career spanning eight decades, in which she appeared in more than 60 films and 30 plays. She is the recipient of awards and nominations in various drama award denominations, including the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, the Academy Awards, the Golden Globe Awards, the Laurel Awards, the Tony Awards, the Drama Desk Awards, and the Laurence Olivier Awards, within which she has won two thirds of her award nominations. As one of the last surviving major stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood and classical years of British cinema, she has several longevity records to her name. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, while her parents were on tour, Johns made several appearances on stage throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s. Her family returned to the United Kingdom, where she was educated in L ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nova Pilbeam
Nova Margery Pilbeam (15 November 1919 – 17 July 2015) was an English film and stage actress. She played leading roles in two Alfred Hitchcock films of the 1930s, and made her last film in 1948. Early life Pilbeam was born in Wimbledon, Surrey (now part of the London Borough of Merton). Her parents were Arnold Pilbeam, an actor and theatre manager, and Margery Stopher Pilbeam. ''Time'' magazine reported that the actress, whose first name was an homage to her maternal grandmother from Nova Scotia, opted to keep her birth name, which she considered far less ridiculous than "Myrna Loy" or "Greta Garbo". Career Pilbeam gained attention as a child stage actress. This led to much work in her teen years. She appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's film '' The Man Who Knew Too Much'' (1934), in which she plays a girl abducted by Peter Lorre's character, following this with her lead performance as Lady Jane Grey in ''Tudor Rose'' (1936). She had a starring role in Hitchcock's ''Young and Inno ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tom Walls
Thomas Kirby Walls (18 February 1883 – 27 November 1949) was an English stage and film actor, producer and director, best known for presenting and co-starring in the Aldwych farces in the 1920s and for starring in and directing the film adaptations of those plays in the 1930s. Walls spent his early years as an actor, from 1905, mostly in musical comedy, touring the British provinces, North America and Australia and in the West End. He specialised in comic character roles, typically flirtatious middle aged men. In 1922 he went into management in partnership with the comic actor Leslie Henson. They had an early success in the West End with a long-running farce, '' Tons of Money'', after which Walls commissioned and staged a series of farces at the Aldwych Theatre that ran almost continuously over the next decade. He and his co-star Ralph Lynn were among the most popular British actors of their time. In addition to his work in the theatre, Walls directed and acted in more than ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marcel Varnel
Marcel Varnel (16 October 1892 – 13 July 1947) was French film director, notably however for his career in the United States and England as a director of plays and films Biography He was born Marcel Hyacinthe le Bozec in Paris, France. Varnel started his working life on the Paris stage, soon becoming a director of musical comedies. In 1925 he moved to New York City working as director in several Broadway operettas, musicals and dramas for the Shubert family. This was followed by a move to Hollywood where he directed three low budget thrillers. In 1934, he moved to England and it was as a director of British comedies – initially working at British International Pictures, Elstree, then moving in 1936 to Gainsborough Pictures – where he produced his best films. Among the performers he worked with were Will Hay, The Crazy Gang, Arthur Askey and George Formby. He died in a car crash near Rake, West Sussex Rogate is a village and civil parish in the Chichester district ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production studio that is a member of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is one of the Big Five studios and a subsidiary of the multinational conglomerate Sony. On June 19, 1918, brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and their business partner Joe Brandt founded Cohn-Brandt-Cohn (CBC) Film Sales Corporation, which would eventually become Columbia Pictures. It adopted the Columbia Pictures name on January 10, 1924 (operating as Columbia Pictures Corporation until December 23, 1968) went public two years later and eventually began to use the image of Columbia, the female personification of the United States, as its logo. In its early years, Columbia was a minor player in Hollywood, but began to grow in the late 1920s, spurred by a successful association with director Frank Capra. With Capra and others such as the most successful two reel comedy series The Three Stooges, Co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
This Man Is Mine (1946 Film)
''This Man Is Mine'' is a 1946 British comedy film directed by Marcel Varnel and starring Tom Walls, Glynis Johns and Jeanne De Casalis. The screenplay concerns a Canadian soldier who is billeted with a British family for the Christmas holidays. It was based on the hit West End play '' A Soldier for Christmas'' by Reginald Beckwith.Baskin & Enser p.421 The film was shot at Pinewood Studios with sets designed by the art director George Provis. It was the final film of French director Varnel, known for his many comedies featuring music hall stars including Will Hay and George Formby, who died in a car accident following the shooting of the film. Premise The wealthy Ferguson family are planning a quiet Christmas at their home in the countryside of Southern England. A series of disruptions begin with the arrival of the married elder daughter, who has fled her London home after a row with her husband. This is followed successively by Millie a WAAF NAAFI girl who used to be a ser ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Billeted
A billet is a living-quarters to which a soldier is assigned to sleep. Historically, a billet was a private dwelling that was required to accept the soldier. Soldiers are generally billeted in barracks or garrisons when not on combat duty, although in some armies soldiers with families are permitted to maintain a home off-post. Used for a building, the term ''billet'' is more commonly used in British English; United States standard terms are ''quarters'', ''barracks'', ''Single (Soldier) Housing'' or ''Family Housing''. British history Originally, a "billet" (from the French) was a note, commonly used in the 18th and early 19th centuries as a "billet of invitation." In this sense, the term was used to denote an order issued to a soldier entitling him to quarters with a certain person. From this meaning, the word billet came to be loosely used of the quarters thus obtained. Repeated petitions against the practice of billeting, starting in the 16th century, culminated in its outla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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