General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The History of Mr. Polly

The History of Mr. Polly is a 1949 British comedy-drama directed by Anthony Pélissier, adapted from H. G. Wells's 1910 novel of the same name, in which John Mills plays Alfred Polly, a daydreaming draper's clerk who escapes an unhappy marriage and a failing shop through arson, a faked death, and work as a ferryman at a country inn.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	1949, United Kingdom; produced by Two Cities Films¹^•³
Director and writer	Anthony Pélissier, his first feature as writer-director¹^•⁴
Producer and star	John Mills, who also plays Alfred Polly¹
Source	H. G. Wells's 1910 novel, which Wells called his most autobiographical²
Running time	94 minutes per the BFI; other listings give 92 to 96 minutes¹^•⁵^•³
Principal cast	Sally Ann Howes (Christabel), Finlay Currie (Uncle Jim), Betty Ann Davies (Miriam Larkins Polly), Megs Jenkins (the Innkeeper)⁶
Commercial result	A relative box-office failure⁷

Spoilers

Story

Alfred Polly is a bookish, directionless man who is sacked from his job as a draper's assistant for daydreaming.⁶ His father's death brings him an inheritance, which he spends, on his uncle's advice, on marrying his cousin Miriam and opening a draper's shop in a small town.¹⁰ Fifteen years later the shop is failing and the marriage has soured into bickering.³

The arson plot. Polly decides to burn down the shop and cut his throat so that Miriam can collect the insurance money.¹¹ The plan misfires: he sets the fire earlier than he intends, rescues a deaf old woman from the neighboring house, and becomes a local hero.¹¹ He leaves Miriam the insurance money and disappears into the countryside, where an innkeeper (Megs Jenkins) takes him on as handyman and ferryman at the Potwell Inn.³^•⁹

His peace is threatened by Uncle Jim (Finlay Currie), the innkeeper's drunken, jail-going relation, who extorts money from her and drives away every odd-job man.¹¹ In their fight, Jim accidentally fires Polly's gun, is thrown backward by the kickback into the river, and drowns in the weir; because he is wearing Polly's trousers and his face is disfigured, the town believes the dead man is Polly himself.¹¹ Polly returns to Fishbourne, finds that Miriam and her sister have turned his old shop into a successful tea shop, and, pretending not to know her, goes back to the inn and his new life.¹¹^•⁹

Production background

The project changed hands before it reached the screen. The Second World War prompted the RKO studio to abandon its planned version of the 1910 novel, one that Wells had told the screenwriter Lance Sieveking was his most autobiographical.² John Mills acquired the rights three years after Wells died in 1946, making this the first Wells story adapted to the screen after the author's death.²^•³ Mills took the title role from Charles Laughton and discarded Sieveking's approved scenario in favor of a screenplay by the director Anthony Pélissier.²

Mills came to the film flush from his success as Pip in David Lean's Great Expectations, and he produced it under the Two Cities Films banner while Pélissier wrote and directed.³ It was Pélissier's first feature; he had previously scripted Alexander Korda's Vacation from Marriage (1945).⁴ Desmond Dickinson shot the film and William Alwyn composed the score.³ Filming took place at Denham Film Studios in Buckinghamshire, near Mills's home, and the fictional town of Fishbourne is thought to be modeled on Sandgate in Kent, where Wells had lived for several years.⁸^•⁹

Reception

The New Yorker's 1951 review, by John McCarten, credited the film with avoiding all false heroics and noted its sardonic glimpses of the English lower middle class, finding humor in such unlikely material as a funeral and an attempt at arson.¹² Later critics have generally praised Mills's performance while finding the film uneven. The BFI's retrospective list calls it an admirably faithful and enduringly witty interpretation, singling out Betty Ann Davies as the shrewish cousin and Finlay Currie as the brutish Uncle Jim alongside Mills.² The DVD reviewer Glenn Erickson judged the film good but noted that its tentative position between comedy and drama can be confusing, and that it makes light of its serious scenes.³ A 2024 retrospective review found the film wanders in too many directions and never combines its elements cohesively.¹³

Commercially the film underperformed. The film historian Christine Geraghty's account of John Mills's career records it, together with The Rocking Horse Winner (1950), as a relative box-office failure after which Mills made no further move toward independent production.⁷

Place in Wells adaptation

Wells's non-fantasy fiction has proven difficult to transfer to film; apart from Kipps, adaptations of it have struggled, and critics have sometimes faulted this film for too-close fidelity to its source.¹⁴ The novel belongs to Wells's series of semi-autobiographical novels about the lower middle class, alongside The Wheels of Chance and Kipps, whose mild-mannered dreamers want to better themselves.³ The film's themes of mid-life crisis, career and marriage problems, and romantic dreaming have been described as, if anything, more relevant now than when Wells wrote.¹¹

The story returned to television in a 2007 BBC adaptation directed by Gillies MacKinnon, starring the comedian Lee Evans as Polly, with Anne-Marie Duff as Miriam and Julie Graham also featured.¹⁴ Reviewers of that version found it a good-natured but simplified treatment that condensed the novel's account of Polly's youth and left the character flatter than Wells wrote him.¹⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026