| A Kid For Two Farthings | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Carol Reed |
| Produced by | Carol Reed |
| Written by | Wolf Mankowitz |
| Starring | Celia Johnson Diana Dors David Kossoff Joe Robinson |
| Music by | Benjamin Frankel |
| Cinematography | Edward Scaife |
| Editing by | A.S. Bates |
| Distributed by | London Films |
| Release date(s) | 15 August 1955 |
| Running time | 96 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
A Kid For Two Farthings is a 1955 film, directed by Carol Reed. The screenplay was adapted by Wolf Mankowitz from his own novel of the same name.
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In the busy wholesale-retail world of London's East End everyone, it seems, has unattainable dreams. Then a small boy - Joe - buys a unicorn, in fact a sickly little goat, with just one twisted horn in the middle of its forehead. This, he has been led to believe by a local tailor, Kandinsky, will bring everyone good fortune.
The film has a haunting last image, of Kandinsky carrying the tiny body of the "unicorn" to the graveyard, whilst passing in the opposite direction is a Torah-reading Rabbi pushing a horn gramophone, a character that appears in the background several times during the film.
A Kid for Two Farthings was nominated for a Golden Palm at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.[1]
Critically, this was one of Carol Reed's least successful films, however the rich ensemble cast, and the interweaving of harsh reality and fantasy remain a potent mix. The character of Kandinsky in particular is seen to embody the plight of surviving European Jews ten years after the Second World War. His mythologizing about a race of unicorns with magic powers that were destroyed everywhere but may still exist in some far-off country, can be seen as analogous to the holocaust.
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