The Square Peg

The Square Peg (1958)

Norman Pitkin and Mr Grimsdale are council workmen mending the road outside an Army base when they come into conflict with the military. Shortly afterwards, they get drafted and fall into the clutches of the Sergeant they have just bested. They are sent to France to repair roads in front of the Allied advance but get captured. Pitkin takes advantage of a useful similarity to impersonate General Schreiber and manages to return a hero

Date of release
1958-12-04
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (34)
Runtime
1h 29m
Genres
War, Comedy
Director
John Paddy Carstairs

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Pinewood Studios

The Square Peg is a 1958 British war comedy film directed by John Paddy Carstairs and starring Norman Wisdom. Norman Wisdom plays two different characters: a man who digs and repairs roads, and a Nazi general.

Production

Producer Hugh Stewart had made several films with Norman Wisdom but was dissatisfied with the last one, Just My Luck. He said he "got together with Jack Davis and I said, 'Let's see if we can do one really with our ideas about what we want about Norman.' So we sat down and we wrote the first real hit that I ever had, which was The Square Peg when he was in the army playing – but I said, 'Let's do something different with him, if we play a double…

According to Norman Wisdom, the idea of Wisdom playing a dual role came from Jack Davies. "I just looked upon it as having fun in another way," he said. "I wasn’t looking to broaden my range, didn’t think of it like that at all.

Honor Blackman recalled John Paddy Carstairs as "just lovely. He was the first director I'd ever known who used to play music on the set to keep everybody jolly — and he was always jolly himself, I never knew him bad tempered."

Nicol Williamson made his film debut in an uncredited role.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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