Piccadilly Incident

Premise

A married woman is believed dead in a shipwreck, but returns home with the Second World War at its height to find her husband remarried.

Cast

Production

Herbert Wilcox made the film as a follow up to I Live in Grosvenor Square (1945). He hoped to use the same leads, Anna Neagle and Rex Harrison, but the success of Grosvenor Square saw Harrison offered a contract with 20th Century Fox. Wilcox offered the role to John Mills, who turned it down. He accepted Michael Wilding reluctantly at the suggestion of Wilding's agent, but once he saw Wilding and Neagle play their first scene together, he put Wilding under a personal long-term contract.

Reception

Piccadilly Incident was the second most popular film at the British box office in 1946, after The Wicked Lady.

It was voted the best British film of 1946 at Britain's National Film Awards. Neagle's performance meant she was voted Best Actress of the year by the readers of Picturegoer magazine.

Though The New York Times thought the film demonstrated "the British are quite as capable as the Americans of unconvincing direction, ill-considered writing and tedious acting", critic Godfrey Winn wrote "In Piccadilly Incident is born the greatest team in British Films"; Leonard Maltin wrote "good British cast gives life to oft-filmed plot"; Allmovie called the film "a weeper deluxe"; and the Radio Times concluded that the film "effectively opens the tear ducts".