Drake’s Duck originated as a radio play in 1951 called Mrs. Major Travers (Howard Marion-Crawford, middle) with an egg. To make matters worse, the farm with all its inhabitants (including a couple of wholly redundant supporting characters) are put on lockdown until the magical goose can be found - something which turns out to be an almost insurmountable task. The first is that the Drakes can’t tell which one of their geese laid the egg, and the second that all branches of the military want in on the action, and very soon the Drake’s once idyllic farm becomes occupied with range rovers, tanks, planes and a few hundred soldiers. And when word about the extraordinary egg spreads, the military is fast on hand to capture the goose that laid the uranium egg. And this is where the trouble starts.īecause the next day, one of the geese lays a radioactive egg made out of uranium. But alas, when city girl Penny goes to the village and watches a livestock auction, she accidentally buys a herd of geese. Accompanying them are the film’s two comedic reliefs, farm hand Reuben ( John Pertwee) and handyman Higgins ( Peter Butterworth). Donald Drake ( Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), an American who’s inherited a Sussex farm and is looking forward to settling down into a nice, quiet life with his newly wedded wife Penny ( Yolande Donlan). In this British comedy, we follow the life of Mr. Drake’s Duckfrom 1951 is another movie that fits right into this pattern. Some of my recent reviews include the Finnish 1948 movie Hormoonit valloillaan, in which a stuck-up businessman is turned into a mental child, the 1949 farce The Perfect Woman, where an ageing playboy must accompany a robotic lady on a date, and the 1950 US production It Happens Every Spring, which sees a high school professor invent a baseball that averts wooden bats. And during the heyday of the screwball comedy, SF provided writers with ample opportunities to throw a wrench in the wheel of the humdrum life of the middle-class family. The very first SF shorts in the late 19th century were comedy skits that were built on the movie camera’s magical ability to make the impossible seem possible. No wonder then, that comedy writers have so often turned their eyes to speculative fiction when writing movie scripts. It is the intrusion of the extraordinary into our ordinary lives that sets up for comical situations. The same rule applies to situation comedy. When I studied journalism, one of the first things we were taught was that “Dog Bites Man” isn’t particularly newsworthy, whereas “Man Bites Dog” is a given headline.
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