Passport To Pimlico
- 1949 film
Ealing comedy about a legal discovery that leads the residents of Pimlico to declare themselves an independent nation, Burgundy. Stars Stanley Holloway, Hermione Baddeley, Margaret Rutherford, Paul Dupuis, Raymond Huntley and more.
Streaming rank this week: 8,663
Press clippings
Cinema and 4K Blu-ray releases for Ealing classic comedies
Ealing Studios classics The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts & Coronets will return to cinemas this year, and come to UHD Blu-ray for the first time as stunning new 4K restorations.
British Comedy Guide, 21st February 2024Get your cockles warming with this Ealing comedy, in which the inhabitants of Pimlico discover an obscure 15th-century charter that makes their manor part of Burgundy. So, in austere postwar London, Stanley Holloway and his neighbours come over all bourgeois, instituting petty little rules, such as customs controls on the tube line. A vintage delight, with none more sparkly than Margaret Rutherford's excitable history professor.
Paul Howlett, The Guardian, 18th September 2016Can Passport to Pimlico predict post-Brexit Britain?
In wake of the historic vote to leave the EU, can we look to the 1949 film for a hint at what's to come?
Barry Norman, Radio Times, 9th July 2016Perhaps the most Ealing-ish of the Ealing comedies, celebrating the cosy sense of wartime togetherness recaptured when the inhabitants of Pimlico - discovering their hereditary independence from Britain - set up a restriction-free (but soon beleaguered and ration-hit) state. It's a brilliant idea whose satirical possibilities are never really explored. The film is nevertheless carried along on a wave of zany inventiveness (hit by sanctions, the 'Burgundians' promptly respond by having customs officers patrol the tube trains passing through their territory), while an amiable cast does well by TEB Clarke's genial script (especially Margaret Rutherford as the history don).
Tom Milne, Time Out, 23rd January 2012