Robert J. Maxwell Cecil Parker is already the blowhard he was to perfect in later movies. He's the Provost of a Scottish village called Beike, pronounced something like "Beakie." He's running for a higher post and gives speeches promoting the value of "a stern hand at the helm." (Is this supposed to be a snap at Hitler?) The poor, matronly, pitifully broke Irish lady, Sarah Algood, sells fast food from a cart and is unable to pay for her dog, Patsy's, license. Driven by Parker, the authorities reluctantly take poor Patsy and condemn her to death by injection. Sure and the dog is nae but a wee mongrel and Parker has bigger things on his mind, making up to the stuffy aristocrats who will back his candidacy.It's a big mistake on Parker's part to ignore that dog. It's always a mistake in the movies to treat a dog with disrespect. You always pay for it in the end.A new reporter for the local newspaper shows up. That's Rex Harrison, full of his usual charming insouciance regarding the social folkways. He writes a piece about the dog and loses his job. And he falls for Parker's daughter, Vivien Leigh, slender, youthful, radiant. When she raises her eyebrows, only one lifts, the one on her right. The left eyebrow remains comfortably in its accustomed place. She's torn between her duty to her father and her love for Harrison.Well -- here we have a charming little village full of folk who know everyone else in town, and a bit of conflict over a dog. It's pregnant with possibilities, some bad. The charm could turn cloying but it doesn't. Nor does the film turn into an Ealing comedy with the subtle touch of genius in every other scene.In fact it's rather dull until about half-way through when the screen explodes and a thousand dogs invade the mansion of Parker while he is entertaining the high muck-a-mucks whose political support is mandatory. It's hilarious. The skinny old men in kilts are dancing awkwardly around, men shouting, dogs barking. The dogs leap on the table and feast on the prepared dinner. They tug at the hems of the kilts. Finally, the elders make their escape from the ruined mansion, shrieking and waving their hands.What follows is a courtroom farce in which Harrison is tried for one or another crime on charges leveled by Parker. It ends happily. Parker decides it's a better ploy to be a populist than a demagogue. Harrison and Leigh wind up in an old car with "Just Married" on the trunk. Or, pardon me, the boot.The movie lacks the tranquil assurance of a film like "A Canterbury Tale," which is also about nothing much. And it does have its longueurs but they're redeemed by the dog invasion.

writers_reign This, alas, has not aged at all well and I'm guessing it will only attract either Leigh or Harrison completists. I was slightly bemused to find that several people who have reviewed it here seem to think that the original German playwright, Bruno Frank, wrote it as an anti-Hitler piece. I don't know much about European politics either then or now but I do know that Bruno Frank wrote Storm In a Water-Glass in 1931, whilst Hitler did not become Chancellor until 1933. As usual with films of that period the director(s) have been cavalier with facts: The setting is a small, remote community in Scotland, the sort of place where people are born and live all their lives but that doesn't prevent Victor Saville casting Sarah Allgood as the catalyst and there is, of course, nothing wrong with that, EXCEPT that Allgood, supposedly a lifelong resident of this small Scottish community, makes no attempt to suppress, or even tone down the 'stage' Oirish accent that served her so well in every film she made (presumably she was stricken with the same ailment that prevented Sean Connery from losing his Scottish accent, even when playing an Irishman). For good measure we also get Mervyn Johns, complete with his own Welsh accent. Neither of the two leads - Vivien Leigh/Rex Harrison - are required to act or indeed do anything except look a) beautiful and b) bemused, but it does become a tad more bearable in the closing courtroom stages.

keithatciren You would probably have to be my age or older and to have lived in the London (England) area as a child; the only area then with television coverage in the UK; to know that the only film BBC television had access to in those days, when the film studios were determined that films would only be seen at the cinema, was 'Storm in a Teacup' staring Rex Harrison. During that period, 1949 - 1953, it was shown each Christmas as a special treat! Soppy film or not, it really was a treat then to see a film in the comfort of one's home.Perhaps someone could add how it was that the BBC obtained this one and only film that allowed them to technically break the embargo.

David Frieze Hidden from me, anyhow - I'd never heard of it until browsing through my local library's video collection. Imagine an Ealing comedy as directed by Frank Capra. All of the acting is first-rate (and Vivien Leigh, pre-"Gone with the Wind", was about as beautiful as any woman could be), and the sets are unusually lavish for what must have been a medium-budget film in its time. The characters are strong yet sufficiently complex to lift the story above the simplistic comic melodrama it might have been - I can't imagine many American films of the time (or of this time) that would allow the "villain" of the piece enough courage to face down and walk through a mob that has just publicly humiliated him and is ready to attack him. The comedy is wonderfully handled, especially during the scene in which a pack of dogs runs rampant through the villain's stately home, and during the climactic courtroom scene. (The film's funniest line makes sense only in the context of the film: Ursula Jeans' anguished "Harold, he called me a woman!") "Storm in a Teacup" is a genuine delight.