Such is how we are introduced by one Henry Hobson, a rotund widower who owns the boot shop, but spends most of his time at the local tavern guzzling booze and trading stories with his longtime friends. As played by legendary character actor Charles Laughton, Hobson is a comically boorish blowhard, as obnoxious as he is set in his ways. A true Victorian, Hobson clings with willful mindlessness to an increasingly outmoded social perspective that elevates men, however useless and burdensome, to the highest rungs of the ladder and casts women into silent supporting roles. Although his shop bears his name, Hobson does little or no work, leaving the business to Maggie (Brenda De Banzie), his eldest daughter and mother stand-in, and everything else to his two other daughters, Alice (Daphne Anderson) and Vicky (Prunella Scales). They have all learned to deal with Hobson’s hung-over cantankerousness and incessant need to assert his authority in every matter, no matter how trivial, yet they are also itching to escape his shadow by marrying. Hobson entertains the idea, although he asserts quite bluntly that Maggie, who is the ripe old age of 30, is clearly past her prime and destined to the life of a spinster.

Yet, as it turns out, Maggie is anything but a passive recipient of Hobson’s patriarchal bullying, and she convinces Hobson’s best bootblack, an uneducated and utterly insecure man named Willie Mossop (John Mills), to marry her. Willie is understandably reluctant, not only because Maggie proposes marriage as more of a business proposition than a romantic endeavor, but because he is perfectly content to slave away in the basement of the boot shop, turning out the finest workmanship in Salford. However, Maggie’s dogged insistence eventually wins him over, which means that Hobson loses on two counts: He loses control of his eldest daughter, who was the brains behind his business, and he loses his best workman.

First staged in 1916, Brighouse’s play is a cutting social comedy that reflects the growing momentum of first-wave feminism in its strong female characters and consistent undercutting of male authority, whether it be the blustery drunkenness of Henry Hobson or the fiddling insecurity of Willie Mossop. While the title, which is a play on the turn of phrase that suggests no choice at all, would make it appear that Hobson is the main character, it is actually Maggie who drives the narrative. Yet, she is the one person who remains resolutely consistent from beginning to end, offering herself as a rock on which Willie may sharpen himself into a competent, confident businessman who realizes his great potential and against which Hobson can hurl and eventually shatter himself, which means that it is up to Maggie and Willie to help him pick up the pieces. However loutish he may be, Hobson is always sympathetic, partially because Laughton’s boisterous performance turns him into a kind of boastful clown and partially because we recognize that he’s all talk, a product of his society who is too stubborn to recognize that the world around him is changing.

Adapted by Lean, his longtime production designer Norman Spencer, and playwright Wynyard Browne, Hobson’s Choice was one of only a handful of comedies Lean directed, yet the skillful manner in which he balances the humor and the social commentary would seem to suggest that it was his genre of choice. After making the comedies This Happy Breed (1944) and Blithe Spirit (1945), Lean had turned to more serious fare, including the powerful wartime romance Brief Encounter and the much-praised adaptations of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). As it turned out, Hobson’s Choice would be his last foray into comedy (as well as his last film made in Britain and his last film shot in black and white), as the subsequent years would find Lean continually working in the romantic/epic mold with films like The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Ryan’s Daughter (1970), and A Passage to India (1984).

The scope of and grandeur of those later films certainly makes a film like Hobson’s Choice seem small by comparison, but at the same time it allows us to see how masterfully Lean was able to infuse the stagebound story with a particularly cinematic air, matching Laughton’s amusingly grandiose egocentrism and petulance (he’s like a Victorian-era Archie Bunker) with a visual style that foregrounds the ugliness of the Industrial Revolution as often as it focuses on cozy domestic spaces. There is plenty of old-world charm to be found in cobblestones and gas lights, but there are also belching smokestacks and polluted rivers, both of which frame the crucial moment when Maggie makes her marriage pitch to Willie. In another film that might be read as negative commentary on the marriage-to-be, but what Hobson’s Choice delivers time and again is a comical twist on the expected: the marriage of convenience grows into real love, the tyrant gets one-upped but then reincorporated into a new family structure, and the powerful woman asserts her strength not by simply controlling those around her, but by invigorating them to self-improvement without ever losing her own identity. It makes everything old seem brilliantly and often hilariously new.

Copyright ©2008 James Kendrick

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