If The Rain's Got to Fall" – Mrs Walsingham, Arthur Kipps, Foster, Helen Walsingham, Lady Punnet and Company Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times remarked that " Half a Sixpence at Grauman's Chinese Theatre is, almost uniquely these days, a picture of innocence (or, if you will, simple-mindedness) and for all its flaws there are those who will respond gratefully to this excursion into the primer-story past. My regret is that the machineries of film-making have rendered the lighter-than-air as heavy as lead and have surrendered innocence to technical sophistication. Tommy Steele is a wonder and he gives a dazzling, perfected performance. Yet even his ingratiating charm cannot quite conceal the hard, slow work the film was. Half a Sixpence is better than none, but it has been devalued." [13] A Proper Gentleman" (Reprise) – Arthur Kipps, Mrs. Walsingham, Helen Walsingham, Mrs. Botting, Young Walsingham and Party Guests

The show is based on H.G. Wells's 1905 novel Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul. Steele played Arthur Kipps, an orphan who unexpectedly inherits a fortune, and climbs the social ladder before losing everything and realising that you just can't buy happiness. Lady Botting's Boating Regatta Cup Racing Song" (by David Heneker and Irwin Kostal), performed by Artie and Chorus

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This was the final film made by Sidney, director of such films as Annie Get Your Gun, Kiss Me Kate, Bye Bye Birdie and Viva Las Vegas. The joyous screen version of the Broadway and London musical hit. "If I had the money, I'd buy me a banjo!" says struggling sales clerk Arthur Kipps (Tommy Steele). Soon he'll inherit enough to buy a whole bloomin' orchestra. But can his newfound wealth buy happiness? Multi-talented Steele brings his London and New York stage smash to the screen in this big, cheerful tune-filled production based on H.G. Wells' charming novel "Kipps." Cyril Ritchard costars as a thespian who introduces Arthur to the joys of Edwardian London's music halls. And a huge cast of high-stepping, high spirited singers and dancers have the time of their lives. Enjoy because "Half A Sixpence" gets you a million dollars' worth of fun.

Half a Sixpence tells the story of Arthur Kipps, an orphan and a draper's assistant who unexpectedly inherits a fortune. The new stage version is the musical adaptation of HG Wells's semi-autobiographical novel Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul, first created by Beverley Cross and David Heneker. Songs included in the show are "Flash, Bang, Wallop" and "Half a Sixpence". The movie was the 13th most popular at the UK box office in 1969. [20] Sidney says the film was "a real smash" in England but "did less than nothing" in the US "because it was an English picture. The film didn't have anyone in it that anyone in this country knew. Unfortunately Tommy Steele had just made two very bad pictures in this country. We followed those and had nothing to build on with him." Sidney also felt the film's financial prospects were hurt by the popularity of Beatlemania. "That brought in a whole new sound," he said. "Maybe if we had been two or three years earlier with the picture, it might have been more successful with American audiences." [9] Awards and nominations [ edit ] The film was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Costume Design - Colour. Although it lost to A Man for All Seasons, its designers did not go home empty-handed, as they were responsible for the costumes in Seasons as well.a b Davis, Ronald L. (2005). Just making movies. University Press of Mississippi. p. 80. ISBN 9781578066902. sold to Gulf & Western. Half a Sixpence should have been a small and intimate picture. It turned out to be anything but that. The director and the star ran away with it, and I was virtually out of the picture. I was very unhappy about the whole situation." [6] Production [ edit ] Several years later he meets up with Ann once again, and with the coin cut into two he gives one half to Ann as a symbol of their love. Artie sees Ann mistreated by the upper class at a dinner and ends his relationship with Helen. He marries Ann and plans to build a mansion. Ann becomes unhappy with Artie's grandiose ambitions. Hubert absconds with Artie's money leaving him broke.

Artie grows up into a young man. Work at the draper's store is difficult. He becomes friends with Harry Chitterlow, an actor-playwright, who discovers that Artie is heir to a fortune left him by his grandfather. Artie becomes wealthy as a result of the inheritance, and invests in one of Chitterlow's shows. He breaks up with Ann, who has become a maid, and becomes engaged to the wealthy upper class Helen Walsingham. Kipps gets Helen's brother Hubert to invest his money. The World's Top Twenty Films." Sunday Times [London, England] 27 Sept. 1970: 27. The Sunday Times Digital Archive. accessed 5 Apr. 2014 American audiences are beginning to get the idea that if you've seen one Tommy Steele movie, you've seen them both. Britishers have been afforded chances to view such products as " The Tommy Steele Story" and " Tommy the Toreador," but we colonists had to restrain ourselves until " The Happiest Millionaire" and, now, Half a Sixpence, an agonizing experience which shows the latest impact of devaluation. Perhaps the proceedings weren't so bankrupt of charm and originality when Steele played the Arthur Kipps role on the London and Broadway stage for four years, safely out of range of the cinematic close-ups which put into Panavision perspective that personified-balloon face and set of teeth that would make Cass Daley completely Crestfallen. Of course he can't control his physiognomy, but he could do something about his general deportment, in which he matches Sandy Dennis in the mannerisms department by strutting and prancing, rolling his eyes, tossing his head, and twitching around so much he looks like a third base coach with a bad case of the shingles. Whereas the play was based on H. G. Wells' novel, "Kipps," its successor engenders excitement more in keeping with a screen adaptation of the Keynesian theory. The cornerstone of any good musical, one would assume, is the score, but David Heneker's songs are so incredibly and unanimously nondescript that the wedding reception sequence could be interchanged with the "Happiest Millionaire" barroom number with no one the wiser. [15] Time Out London says, "the film lays on the period charm rather exhaustingly, and the songs ... don't exactly sweep you along." [19] Box office [ edit ]Fun as the musical is, it already shows its age: conspicuously, there is no diversity in the casting. But Kipps confirms Wells’s point that gusto and goodness can overcome the whaleboned snobbery of the class system and the show boasts an invaluable asset in Charlie Stemp, who went on to play the chimney sweep in the stage version of Mary Poppins. Tommy Steele was likable in Half a Sixpence, but there is something a touch calculated about his charm. Stemp radiates kindly innocence and reminds us that Wells subtitled his quietly subversive novel “the story of a simple soul”.

Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News that "for all Gillian Lynne's high-stepping choreography, the film is about as light and as graceful on its feet as an elephant. Only one sequence moves at a rate approximating speed. It is the gay Henley regatta, with Kipps crewing for the Ascot set, slicing the Thames in a racing shell. One longs for the simplicity of the original, when the story, although hardly novel, at least held its own, and when the music, although hardly memorable, was not drummed up into interminable, brassy music hall routines." [12] Robson Arms is a Canadian television series that began airing on CTV on June 17, 2005 and ended on June 30, 2008. Robson Arms is a co-production between Vancouver-based Omni Film Productions Limited and Halifax’s Creative Atlantic Communications.

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In June 1966, George Sidney signed to direct. [3] Steele signed a three picture deal with Paramount. [4] Arthur Kipps, an orphan, is an over-worked draper’s assistant at Shalford’s Bazaar, Folkestone, at the turn of the last century. He is a charming but ordinary young man who, along with his fellow apprentices, dreams of a better and more fulfilling world, but he likes his fun just like any other, except not quite. When Kipps unexpectedly inherits a fortune that propels him into high society, it confuses everything he thought he knew about life. In Victorian England, a young orphan, Arthur Kipps ("Artie"), finds a sixpence as he walks along a river with his young friend, Ann. Artie is then sent to a nearby town, where he is to serve as apprentice to a draper.