The saucy British comedy that sold out cinemas in post-war New York

In November 1949, the London Evening News announced that producer Sydney Box had just heard the surprising news that a low-budget film he’d produced five years before was breaking box office records over in New York.  

29, Acacia Avenue (1945) had been retitled The Facts of Love for American audiences, and the critics greeted it as “screamingly funny” and “a gay little package of nonsense”, adding: “Once again the English have proved themselves masters of revealing idiosyncrasies with humour and good sense.”

Sydney Box was singled out as the talent behind it: “Box, who with his wife Muriel also wrote the screenplay, once again proves himself as sound a showman as he is a sensitive recorder of British strengths and weaknesses.” The Facts of Love ran for over a year on Times Square, recouping its budget in that one cinema alone.  

Despite the many film projects Sydney and Muriel Box had undertaken since making 29, Acacia Avenue in 1944, it was a production they would never forget, since it very nearly didn’t get made. It was their first independent feature, and their diary entries record bouts of insomnia due to the difficulties of getting funding, which grew more acute as the production date approached. Their sleep was also disturbed by flying bombs: on the night of 3 July, Muriel Box counted 30 of them while on firewatch duty. Despite sleepless nights and war work, the Boxes had their script ready later that month.  

They had purchased the rights to the play Acacia Avenue, by Mabel Constanduros and her nephew Denis, in February that year for £2,000. Constanduros was a mainstay of BBC radio, having created the successful series The Buggins Family. Acacia Avenue was based on another of her radio plays about the lives of ordinary British families, this time the Robinsons. It was written in 1941, but the war kept it from the stage until 1943, when it opened at the Vaudeville on 14 October, after a brief regional tour.  

It was a huge success and ran for eight months, only being taken off due to bombing raids.  It was soon sent on a major UK tour, before the cast headed off to the Middle East to entertain the troops, and the play remained a staple in repertory and with amateur groups throughout the 1940s and 50s.  

The play is a farce, but it’s set in middle-class suburbia instead of the more usual upper-class drawing room. Mr and Mrs Robinson decide to go on a cruise instead of their customary week in Bognor, leaving their children, Peter and Joan, at home. Joan invites her new fiancé to stay at the house for a ‘trial run’, while Peter is invited for a weekend away with Fay, not realising she’s married and that her husband is lying in wait for them. 

En route to Southampton, Mr and Mrs Robinson decide against the cruise, perhaps worried by their neighbour’s warning that “Once a man gets in the tropics, away go his inhibitions,” and opt for the reassuring comfort of their usual south-coast B&B. They return home early, just in time to prevent Joan ruining her reputation.  

The radio play was updated for the stage, to amplify the sexual tensions in a wartime period when morality was loosening. Originally, the Robinsons’ son Peter stayed at home to see the racing at Brooklands rather than to spend time with a woman. Denis Constanduros was his aunt’s regular writing partner, and their differing generational perspectives were key to their success.  

It was exactly the risqué tone of the play that would have appealed to Muriel Box; the theme of extramarital sex found its way, either explicitly or by implication, into several of her screenplays. Perhaps this was not surprising, as she had very unconventional views on marriage; she and Sydney had lived together in the mid-30s, only getting wed when a court case threatened to bring their personal situation into the public eye.  

By mid-August 1944, sets for Acacia Avenue had been built and the cast was in place, but the Boxes still didn’t have the money and were trying to get an overdraft to meet the production costs. It was refused and, towards the end of the month, co-producer William MacQuitty and star Gordon Harker had to step in with some cash to get filming underway. Eventually, Alfred Shipman, co-owner of Shipman and King cinema circuit saved the day, on the understanding that his investment would be recouped first.  

Henry Cass, director of the stage version, again took charge, while Gordon Harker, Megs Jenkins and Hubert Gregg recreated their roles for the screen. As Mrs Robinson, the Boxes cast Betty Balfour, one of Britain’s biggest silent stars, who hadn’t acted in a film for nearly 10 years. Jimmy Hanley stepped into the role of the Robinsons’ son Peter, which was expanded for the film, while his sister Joan was played by newcomer Jill Evans. Fresh from repertory, the 17-year-old had just been signed to a £22,000 contract by Sydney Box. However, this was her one and only film, so it seems that, on this occasion, Sydney’s astute eye for talent may have failed him.  

By 26 September, filming at Riverside Studios had finished and, by the end of October, location shooting was completed. But the Boxes’ problems weren’t over, as they now had to find a distributor. While the BBFC passed the film, and audiences at the first test screening loved it, J. Arthur Rank deemed it “a dirty picture” and didn’t want to be associated with it.  

In fact, Rank found it so immoral that he offered the Boxes £45,000 to shelve it indefinitely. The ABC chain also refused to show it, so once again Alfred Shipman stepped in, persuading Columbia to put it on their slate of films, and it finally had a trade screening on 7 June 1945. The critics were positive, though the film’s suggestiveness made some uncomfortable.  

Kinematograph Weekly, while deeming it an amusing film, wrote: “There are times when the frankness of its situations and dialogue is a trifle embarrassing. Although of the family it’s definitely not for the family … [but] it should tickle industrial audiences.” The female characters are given most of the innuendo. Fay (Carla Lehmann) suggests to Peter that they should skip the tennis match they’d arranged as, she says, “I can think of much nicer things to do indoors.” And when Megs Jenkins, as Shirley the maid, flees from her over-amorous boyfriend, she complains that: “He tried to come it over me.” 

Of course, it all seems terribly innocent today, but such spicy quips obviously did ‘tickle’ audiences. The trade press classified it as a ‘sex domestic comedy’, and its frank approach to taboo subjects surely looked forward to the Carry On films that kept Brits tittering for 20 years. While Gainsborough’s period melodramas had dealt with the topic of sex outside marriage, it was always in the context of a time or place removed from the contemporary.  

Constanduros’ stock-in-trade was the everyday trials of British families, and the film introduces this one with an on-screen card that reads: “Meet the Robinsons! You know them – they live next door to you – in fact – they are you!” The element of identification was key, and wartime audiences found comfort in entertainment that took them away from the conflict, while gentle mockery of the foibles of the commuter class was a rich seam.  

Quite what post-war New Yorkers saw in the film remains a mystery, but thankfully its success there justified the confidence that the Boxes, and Alfred Shipman, placed in this unassuming tale of youthful rebellion against social and sexual conventions.  

The BFI National Archive acquired a nitrate print from Rank from which a duplicate negative and viewing print were made in 1993. This can be accessed via our research viewing service.