Henry Cornelius's Genevieve (1953)

 Henry Cornelius will be best remembered for Genevieve, a luminous comedy of the outdoors, a film glowing with a Defoe-like sense of property.

--Andrew Sarris

Genevieve was one of the few movies I saw as a kid, since I was not allowed to go to movie theatres (too expensive and too many perverts my parents said). But my father was an enthusiastic member and sometime officer of the AUHV -- Automobilists of the Upper Hudson Valley -- and would drag my mother and the three kids to regular "old car meets," which in my memory happened almost every Sunday but were probably less often.  In any case, sometimes at these meetings, if they had the proper interior space, they would occasionally stop talking about their vintage cars and show a 16 mm, print of Genevieve.  The film is about an annual London to Brighton and back again rally of old cars.  In retrospect it's rather amusing to me that the old car fanciers in the film act like children in their possessiveness and affection for their cars; at one point Alan McGim (John Gregson) has a fight with his wife Wendy (Dinah Sheridan) and spends the night with his car Genevieve -- a 1904 Darracq -- instead of with Wendy.

Genevieve is certainly meant to be funny (and occasionally is) but, like much British humour it has dark undercurrents. McGim is still annoyed that Amber Claverhouse (Kenneth More) had once dated Wendy and when they both get inebriated they make a bet that McGim in his Darracq can beat Claverhouse in his Spyker back to London and they both cheat and backstab, including calling the cops on each other, all the way there, with Wendy and Claverhouse's girlfriend Rosalind (Kay Kendall) somewhat unwilling participants. There are some touching moments, including Rosalind playing the trumpet at a dance party and Alan and Wendy stopping during the race back to listed to an elderly man describe how he proposed to his wife in a car just like Genevieve, and their are some good turns by British character actors, especially Joyce Grenfell as a hotel proprietress. 

Director Henry Cornelius was South African and his directing career was short:  only five films before his untimely death at age 44 in 1958.  The film was written and produced by William Rose and the cinematographer was Christopher Challis.  The filming was mostly on location and the colour was lovely, Challis having worked previously with Powell and Pressburger.