While Reverend Walter Goodfellow (Atkinson) has been toiling away writing the perfect sermon for the upcoming clergy convention, his family has begun falling apart. His daughter is lining herself up to be the town bike, his son is the constant target of every bully at school and his wife is about to run off with her golf pro (Swayze in all his sleazy glory). What this family needs is a modern Mary Poppins to get their lives back in order, and thats just what they find when Grace (a devilishly coy Smith) and her mysterious trunk arrive. Grace has some unusual (not to mention dark) ways of resolving problems, but they're deadly effective...Ah Rowan Atkinson, Mr Bean, Black Adder, such a funny man but you make such mediocre movies. Usually, anyway! Keeping Mum is a rare and, to be honest, unexpected exception to this rule. It borrows a page from the Ealing comedies of the 50s and delivers some of the best black humour in years. I don't think I stopped laughing for the entire 100 odd minutes I was in the cinema, and I certainly never thought I'd enjoy seeing Patrick Swayze in plastic underpants quite so much...

Eight members of the wealthy and aristocratic DAscoyne family stand in the way of the poor relation Louis Mazzini inheriting their wealth and a dukedom. The Machiavellian Mazzini (played by Dennis Price, who you would have seen in Double Take's Horror Hospital, but don't hold that against him) proceeds to eliminate his rivals one by one. Alec Guinness plays all eight members of the eccentric, and clearly inbred, family. This delicious black comedy about social class was based on the novel 'Israel Rank' by Roy Horniman and inspired by Charles Chaplin's more controversial Monsieur Verdoux. This was one of the earliest of the comedies to come out of the Ealing Studio that later produced The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers.