Passport to Pimlico

Perhaps the most Ealingish of the Ealing comedies, celebrating the cosy sense of wartime togetherness recaptured when the inhabitants of Pimlico, discovering their hereditary independence from Britain, set up a restriction-free (but soon beleaguered and ration-hit) state. A brilliant idea whose satirical possibilities are never really explored. The film is nevertheless carried along on a wave of zany inventiveness (hit by sanctions, the 'Burgundians' promptly respond by having customs officers patrol the tube trains passing through their territory), while an amiable cast does well by TEB Clarke's genial script (especially Margaret Rutherford as the history don quivering with ecstasy over the historical significance of the discovery of the ancient Burgundian charter).