Give Us the Moon

Plot

Although made in 1943-44, the film is set in peacetime Britain, a few years after the end of World War II. Peter Pyke, the son of a millionaire hotel owner, had been a RAF pilot during the war but, much to the frustration of his hard-working father, he doesn't want to work for a living and instead wastes his time away, living in his father's hotel (aptly named "Eisenhower Hotel" after Dwight D. Eisenhower who lead the Allied invasion in 1944). So when Peter finds a club founded by people, mainly White Russian émigrés, who refuse to be of any use to society, he immediately joins them.

Cast

Production and release

The film is based on the 1939 novel The Elephant is White, written by Caryl Brahms and her Russian émigré writing partner S. J. Simon, but the story was moved from Paris in the 1930s to London in the late 1940s. Brahms and Simon provided additional dialogue to director Val Guest's screenplay.

The film opened at the New Gallery cinema in London on 31 July 1944, less than two months after D-Day and almost a year before the war would end in Europe. Film reviewers at the time were not very impressed - The Times reviewer found it to be "a film which opens well [but] ends not with the bang of vigorous cinematic invention but the whimper of overworked dialogue." - but nowadays the film is regarded by some to be "one of the most delightful comedies ever made".