Hobson's Choice

Henry Horatio Hobson runs a prosperous bootmaker's shop in Victorian Salford, and he is in no hurry to see his three daughters married, since weddings would mean paying out settlements he would rather keep. His eldest, Maggie, keeps the business and the household running, and when her father decides she must stay at home to look after him while her younger sisters are free to wed, she turns his plan against him. She sets her sights on the firm's gifted but unassuming boot hand, William Mossop, and the pair strike out on their own.

David Lean directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay he wrote with Wynyard Browne and Norman Spencer. It came after a run of Dickens adaptations and before Summertime, in the middle stretch of a career that began with In Which We Serve in 1942. Charles Laughton plays Hobson, with John Mills as Mossop, Brenda De Banzie as Maggie, and Daphne Anderson and Prunella Scales as her sisters.

The Harold Brighouse stage comedy is relocated here to the late nineteenth century, and the film runs 108 minutes. On TMDB it holds a rating of 7.4 out of 10 from 171 votes, a solid score for a British comedy of its era.