Hush, Hush Sweet Mum!by Anonymous

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February 25, 2007: KEEPING MUM is a little British pastiche of a film based on a story by Richard Russo and adapted for the screen by Niall Johnson who also directs. It is one of those little 'comedies' Sir Alec Guinness made endearing, comedy touched with the morbid, but allowing the completed meal to be wholly palatable. Opening with a note '43 years earlier' we see a charming and attractive young pregnant woman (Emilia Fox) boarding a train somewhere in England, her only odd characteristic is her large trunk which is seeping blood: the trunk contains the bodies of the girl's husband and mistress and she is carted off to detention. Jump to the present (or 43 years later) and in a little English village the Vicar, Reverend Walter Goodfellow (Rowan Atkinson) tends to his flock and is frustrated with writing a speech for a convention, paying more attention to his clerical duties than to his frustrated wife Gloria (Kristin Scott Thomas), his philandering daughter Holly (the beautiful Tamsin Egerton) and his bullied son Petey (Toby Parkes). Holly is having an affair with her lothario golf pro Lance (Patrick Swayze) and in general the family is disheveled - until they hire Grace Hawkins (the inimitable Maggie Smith) who takes up residence with them, her only possession being her 'trunk'. Grace has her own manner of taking care of distasteful issues: she simply eliminates them and throws them in a pond growing algae. She gradually breaks the news that Holly, an orphan as a child, is the progeny of Grace's pregnancy when she was imprisoned and proceeds to correct the various messes the Goodfellow family has been facing: she peppers the Vicar's sermons with jokes, increasing his congregation and dispenses with the vicar's headache parishioner Mrs. Parker (Liz Smith) she renews the marital fidelity to Gloria and the Vicar, disposing of Lance she handles the school problems of Petey and the boy problems of Holly. Her trunk ends up being a Pandora's Box for the village and the family! With a thoroughly delightful cast of pros, settings that are picture perfect, a script that always retains humor even in the most odd circumstances, and a musical score that underlines the flavor of the tale, KEEPING MUM is a delight to watch. Deep it is not, but it is a warmly funny though strange little movie that is a crowd pleaser. Grady Harp