Song of the Road

Artless and soft-centred it may be, but Baxter's movie has great symptomatic interest, and its celebration of decency and kindness seems unusually heartfelt. Williams plays a redundant council worker who takes to the road with his beloved cart-horse Polly. His adventures with a travelling fair and then as a farmworker suggest a middle-aged Cockney Shane, sorting out people's problems, giving the villain a pasting, then moving on. Some irksome comic business betrays Baxter's music hall origins, but you don't expect such extensive location work in a British film of this vintage, nor to encounter the matter-of-course assumption that war is just around the corner.