The History of Mr Polly (TV Movie 2007)

The History of Mr Polly: Directed by Gillies MacKinnon. With Lee Evans, Anne-Marie Duff, Julie Graham, Richard Coyle. In the early 1900s Alfred Polly, still hankering after his dream girl Christabel, marries Miriam Larkins and they open a shop, but, as the years go by, the marriage becomes stale and Polly feels trapped. He decides to stage his own death by burning down the shop but becomes an accidental hero when he saves a deaf old lady from the flames. Giving Miriam the insurance pay-out he decides to go walkabout and gets a job at a country pub, the Potwell Inn, run by a kindly landlady. However, her violent nephew Jim is driving the customers away and Polly reluctantly faces up to him. Jim is drunk and falls in the river and drowns, wearing a pair of trousers stolen from Polly with Polly’s name inside and so at last Polly has his perfect escape as it is assumed his is the corpse. After a visit to Miriam, now perfectly happy running a tea-shop, he returns to the Potwell Inn and the idyllic life he has always craved.

“By 2007, the film version of the History of Mr Polly was dated. The black and white film had not aged well and the occasional television performances were not of a high visual quality.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eTherefore praise goes to ITV for remaking this classic HG Wells story for the small screen. Often remakes for the big screen fail to impress. By producing this version which remained faithful to the book and the original film and by screening it on a Sunday evening, ITV scored a huge success.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe cast is of a very high quality with Lee Evans adding to his repertoire of vexed characters. All the performances were strong and the pace of acting and story telling was more appealing to a 21st century audience.”