Director – Ralph Thomas, Screenplay – Peter Blackmore, Producer – Betty E. Box, Photography – Ernest Steward, Music – Benjamin Frankel, Art Direction – George Provis. Production Company – Group Film Productions Limited.
Cast
Glynis Johns (Caroline Trewella/Miranda Trewella), Margaret Rutherford (Nurse Carey), Donald Sinden (Jeff Saunders), Anne Crawford (Barbara Davenport), Dora Bryan (Berengaria), Nicholas Phipps (Colonel Barclay Sutton), Peter Martyn (Ronald Baker), David Hurst (Signor Mantalini), Anthony Oliver (Pawnbroker), Noell Purcell (Percy)
Plot
School teacher Caroline Trewella goes to stay at the family inn in Cornwall. She ventures down to explore the cave under the house the opens into the sea. There she encounters the mermaid Miranda. Caroline and Miranda connect after finding they are related. Both are identical doubles for the other and agree to swap places for two weeks – Caroline goes off on a cycling holiday, while Miranda sets out to explore men. Seeing a photo of Caroline’s fiancé Ronald Baker, Miranda finds him rather ordinary and decides she can find better prospects for Caroline. And so she sets out using her spell to lure the men all around her.
The British comedy Miranda (1948) was a charming delight. Glynis Johns played a mermaid who exuded a spell that made men go crazy for her at the same time as making life miserable for straight man Griffith Jones. As far as I am aware, it was the first film made about Mermaids and quickly inspired a Hollywood copy with Mr Peabody and the Mermaid (1948). Six years later, star Glynis Johns returned in a sequel Mad About Men, along with Margaret Rutherford as the nurse, as well as screenwriter/original playwright Peter Blackmore and producer Betty E. Box.
Mad About Men is essentially the same as Miranda but with a more complicated plot. In addition to Miranda, Glynis Johns also plays her relative Caroline and the plot has a contrivance where the two are dead ringers and Caroline agrees to swap places with Miranda for two weeks. While Miranda avoided the romantic element and concentrated on misunderstandings with taken men, Mad About Men repeats the same but also has Miranda causing comic chaos as she searches for a better fiancé for Caroline. There is also a subplot where Nicholas Phipps falls under Miranda’s spell and his fiancée Anne Crawford sets out to demonstrate that Miranda is a mermaid during a public performance.
Of course, the thing that makes all of this still sparkle a second time is the great Glynis Johns and her wonderfully flirtatious eyes and range of coy expressions. (One quibble might be the title where it is not so much Miranda being mad about men – desirous might be a better word – as men being driven crazy by her presence. A more apt title might have been something like ‘Making Men Go Mad’). There is equally appealing support from the great Margaret Rutherford who steals much of the show whenever she is around with her dotty nurse routine.
The wonderful Glynis Johns as the mermaid Miranda
As before, Glynis Johns’ fish-out-of-water role is one of the more appealing things about the film. To explain being in a wheelchair, she is told to say that she had a fall between parallel bars during gymnastics, which comes out over the dinner table as “I was going between bars and fell down.” On the other hand, under a new director, Mad About Men lacks quite the same charmed silliness of Miranda – the plot is a little too packed and has too much running around for its own good.
There is a certain discrepancy about the running time of the film. The IMDB insists it is 90 minutes long whereas every copy available today runs to only 81 minutes.
Ralph Thomas (1915-2001) was a British director between the 1940s and 70s, mostly known for the series of comedies starring Dirk Bogarde that began with Doctor in the House (1961). In genre material, Thomas also made the spy film Some Girls Do (1969), the sex comedy Percy (1971) with Hywel Bennett receiving the world’s first penis transplant and its sequel Percy’s Progress (1974) where Percy becomes the last fertile man in the world, and the John Wyndham adapted alternate history film Quest for Love (1971).
