Self-confessed waster and non-literary man Gulliver Sheils hatches a plan to escape glum 40's Ireland for the South Seas...

This beautiful little Ealing comedy is rarely seen, probably because it has no big names and is an Ealing experiment in Irish humour rather than their usual business of English. Robert Beatty, fresh from his turn as an IRA man in Odd Man Out, makes a very convincing loafer, all excuses permanently in hand - 'I'm not a literary man, at all.' The rarely seen Moira Lister shines as his middle class love interest, much more rooted to the real world and trying to make Beatty respectable enough for marriage. And there's a small turn by Wilfred Brambell looking very much like Albert Steptoe fifteen years before Albert Steptoe.

The ending is very much an English solution to an Irish problem. If only Home Rule assured us all a wage and girl...

I also wonder if Brendan Behan saw this film, through a beer glass in the late 40's in some Dublin fleapit, and decided to adopt its style. It certainly anticipates much of his take on Irish character and humour.

Rarely has a film benefited from such outstanding location photography. It opens with a lyrical montage of dawn over Dublin which leads quite naturally into a sequence of workers arriving at the Customs House (a magnificent high angle shot as they trudge across the marbled floor of an enormous vestibule) which cuts into a shot of a worker arriving at a rather poky little office to take the place of Gulliver Shiels. His desk hasn't been touched for 18 months and as its roll-top lid is drawn back the camera tracks in to a flood of travel leaflets which come spilling out. This fades into a shot of Shiels taking it easy as he lies in bed reading a travel folder.

After this deft introduction of the principal character, the other main protagonists are introduced with almost equal facility. Moira Lister makes a charming study against the clouds, as the waves break against the shore of a pebbly beach and our hero clambers up the hill-side to catch a smoke-puffing train. Unfortunately, she doesn't live up to this intriguing introduction and proves to be rather a drag in a spate of wearisome romantic clinches with the hero which would have been better left on the cutting-room floor.

Fortunately, the main story is ingenious and novel and amusing and has some splendid characterizations - Stanley Holloway as a delightfully fruity but financially embarrassed tippler, and a host of lesser but equally bright cameos such as Michael Dolan's grumpy, dog-hating attorney (those who saw him in A Hard Day's Night will hardly recognize Wilfred Brambell as his dead-faced partner),Maureen Delaney as an evil-eyed newspaperwoman, Michael Golden as a fair-minded detective, and Desmond Keane as the black-visaged Parkes. Sheila Manahan is charming in a small part as a maid. Despite his prominence in the cast list, Michael Medwin has a small and relatively unimportant role. Beatty's Irish accent is thoroughly convincing.

Charles Crichton sometimes comes across as a rather dull director, though often he displays considerable flair when present on actual locations as he does here (and in The Third Secret). How he achieved some of the remarkable high angle shots beggars the imagination and one admires his patience in waiting for just the right atmosphere in many of his street scenes.

Another Shore is often brilliantly edited (e.g. the Carnival sequence, and that wonderfully amusing and inventive montage in which Beatty and Holloway prepare for their trip) and reveals the special skills that a director like Crichton who came up through film editing often acquires. It is obvious that Crichton knows exactly the right angles to shoot to get his effects. The action scenes in particular are staged with considerable expertise and the way they are edited is a major factor in their success.

Auric has contributed a charming, lyrical music score which perfectly captures the mood and atmosphere of this delightful film, so aptly sub-titled "A Tragi-Comedy of Dublin Life". The art direction is most attractive (though Miss Lister's costumes are often rather dull) and production values are first class. If only it were shorn of just a little of its spurious love interest, Another Shore would be a minor masterpiece.

Suspension of disbelief is not easy when the slow pacing of a film serves to draw attention to its weaknesses. The idea that a man would spend his life hanging around Dublin in the vain hope that he could save a rich old person from an accident and then become their beneficiary, struck me as not so much whimsical as downright insane. And while there is such a thing as the attraction of opposites, it is hard to credit that such an attractive and vivacious woman as the one portrayed by Moira Lister would go to the lengths she does to pursue a bone-idle dreamer who makes it clear that he is not really interested in her. The perhaps inevitable twist toward the end can't help but point up the previous inanities. Robert Beatty, good as men of action, seems miscast in a role more suited to Alec Guinness, as does Stanley Holloway in a part that could have been infinitely funnier played by Alastair Sim. There are compensations in the gentle Irish humour and some likeable character actors, but it is little surprise that Another Shore didn't make more of an impact.