Our Mother's House, ghost signs and Liberal News
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
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I have blogged before in praise of the 1967 film Our Mother's House and its score:
Away from the film Delerue's music is pleasant, but in context I know of no score which so alters the mood of its film. Our Mother's House is a dark story of a family of children who conceal the death of their mother to avoid being taken into care. Just as the deception is about to be discovered there absentee father turns up and we discover things are not quite as they seemed.
This could have been a distasteful film, yet the music - innocent, lilting, compassionate - lifts it into a different sphere altogether. In doing so it gives Our Mother's House a claim to be one of the most important British films of the 1960s.
Like another domestic horror of the period, The Nanny from 1965 (both films feature the excellent Pamela Franklin), it shows children fighting against oppressive adult authority and the weight of the past.The short extract above features one of the film's young stars, Louis Sheldon Williams, who is of further interest to this blog for two reasons.
First, because he grew up to have an interest in the ghost signs that this blog sometimes writes about - see this Guardian article about him from 2003.
Second, because the Sheldon Williams family were good Liberals. In particular, his mother Ann used to write a weekly column for Liberal News in the sixties, just as I did for its successor Liberal Democrat News in the noughties.
I know that from studying the wonderful bound volumes they used to keep in the Liberal Democrat News office. I hope they are now in good hands.
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