Appendix

Sparrows Can't Sing review, Saturday Review, 5/11/63

Aspects of marriage

...And, as luck would have it, the next evening I saw a British comedy, Sparrows Can't Sing, that presents some marital difficulties, too.  A seaman has come home after a two-year voyage and finds his wife is living with a bus driver estranged from his wife.  Matters become complicated when the wife finds she is still attracted to her husband.  As for the husband, he insists he still has "conjoogal" rights, and she must come and live with him, bringing the two children (whose paternity is somewhat uncertain).  Just how all this works out is a little difficult for us to gather, since the dialogue proceeds in the East London idiom, a dialect that seems rather far removed from English.  One gathers, though, that these East London types are working out some obscure moral codes of their own, with two menages, rather than one, as a possible way out.  English subtitles might have helped clarify the problems for American audiences.

                                    --Hollis Alpert