A Kid for Two Farthings

In a lower-class London community of small shops, open-air vendors and flea-marketers, Joe, a small boy..

• Director:Carol Reed
• Genre:Comedy | Drama | Family | Fantasy | Sport
• Runtime:96 minutes

Cast

Celia Johnson : Joanna
Diana Dors : Sonia
David Kossoff : Avrom Kandinsky
Joe Robinson : Sam Heppner
Jonathan Ashmore : Joe

In the busy wholesale-retail world of London’s East End everyone, it seems, has unattainable dreams. Then a small boy – Joe – buys a unicorn, in fact a sickly little goat, with just one twisted horn in the middle of its forehead. This, he has been led to believe by a local tailor, Kandinsky, will bring everyone good fortune.

Critically, this was one of Carol Reed’s least successful films, however the rich ensemble cast, and the interweaving of harsh reality and fantasy remain a potent mix. The character of Kandinsky in particular is seen to embody the plight of surviving European Jews ten years after the Second World War. His mythologizing about a race of unicorns with magic powers that were destroyed everywhere but may still exist in some far-off country, can be seen as analogous to the holocaust.

A Kid for Two Farthings was nominated for a Golden Palm at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.[1]

The film has a haunting last image, of Kandinsky carrying the tiny body of the “unicorn” to the graveyard, whilst passing in the opposite direction is a Torah-reading Rabbi pushing a horn gramophone. This character appeared in the background several times during the film . Read more

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