A million agriculturalists depend for their survival upon people like me working in a London office

I embarked on watching Dear Mr. Prohack (1949) for Glynis Johns and she does have a charming part in this uneven comedy of a professionally frugal civil servant who fails to exercise the same austerity at home when a long-forgotten good turn does him another to the tune of £250,000—after rear-ending a borrowed roadster into his new-polished Humber Pullman, she wangles herself into his taxi and finishes the conversation hired as his private secretary, as self-possessed and forthright as she'll finish the story married to his son—but I confess myself distracted by the two-scene screen debut of Denholm Elliott because he's cast so much against anything that would resemble his type, a bespectacled little weed of a socialist prig who talks about the privileged classes and denounces his father-in-law as a parasitical capitalist but can't stomach the idea of actually working the land with his college first in Agriculture. God knows how Sheila Sim even ran into him in her bohemian drop-out theatre milieu except that they seem to be rehearsing some agitprop about the steel industry. He looks barely old enough to have graduated with his all-nighter face and his schoolboy slouch; he had to lose his temper for his eyebrows to rake properly and his voice grit out of its clear tenor. (The glasses make him look like a young Krogstad.) He's instantly recognizable and he would be much more himself by his next appearance on film when someone in the intervening years of Christopher Fry had taken notice of his real talents for quirks and edges, weaknesses and charm. Meanwhile Johns is romancing Dirk Bogarde who offscreen had just life-partnered with her ex-husband and Cecil Parker has an Arthurian fever dream which includes among other surrealisms the Westminster chimes being rung on his shining armor. I believe I like everyone in this movie better in other movies, but when you throw in Hermione Baddeley it does have a heck of a cast.