The Duke

The final feature movie directed by Roger Michell,The Duke is a delightful throwback to classic Ealing Studios comedies such as The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) in which endearing English eccentricity is the principal source of amusement. This is no big surprise as one of Michell's best-known films, Notting Hill (1999), was made under that studio's aegis.

In a role that in the day would have starred Alec Guinness, the incomparable Jim Broadbent  plays Kempton Bunton, a working-class denizen of Newcastle-on-Tyne in England’s North who fervently believes in the rights of man. When we first meet him he is waging a quixotic battle against a universal obligation to possess a BBC television license. With the help of his son (Fionn Whitehead) he campaigns tirelessly for old age pensioners and veterans to be exempt. Ironically he doesn’t have a job, or if he does get one, soon loses it by arguing with management over matters of principle. Helen Mirren plays Dorothy his loving but long-suffering wife who works as a housekeeper to enable the family to scrape by financially.

The Duke, deftly scripted by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman opens with Kempton appearing in court accused of the 1961 theft from London’s National Gallery of a Goya portrait, painted around 1812, of the Duke of Wellington. It then jumps back to six months earlier and we learn how Kempton with his idiosyncratic logic and indefatigable energy came to be to be in possession of the painting.

Much as Ealing comedies drew on their working class settings for their appeal so too here the milieu of rows of drab, run-down tenements, grey skies and ceaseless rain function as a contrasting backdrop to Kempton’s seemingly tireless enthusiasm for social justice. The production design, art direction, wardrobe and related matters, along with quality cinematography by Mike Eley all work seamlessly to deliver a film that will appeal especially to seniors who grew up watching those quintessentially English English comedies on television. .

 

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