Een koninkrijk voor een huis!

Summary

Comedy about the post-war housing shortage.

Een koninkrijk voor een huis! is based on the Amsterdam city council’s decision to requisition rooms to house homeless people. Heintje Blom, a simple working woman, is told to move into a villa in a posh part of town. The inhabitants are none too pleased but in spite of the class division, a romance blossoms between the rich family’s son and Heintje’s daughter. The two families warm to each other in the end and the happy pair is united in wedded bliss.

Director Jaap Speyer’s Een koninkrijk voor een huis! marked the return of the feature length Dutch film to the cinemas. Speyer, who had made several comedies before the war, including De Jantjes (The sailor lads), wasted no time in picking up where he had left off. If it weren’t for the film’s subject of post-war housing misery, the terrible events of the last six years might as well not have happened.

The film is full of the same old jokes and japes as the pre-war Jordaan films. The public came to see the film in droves but contrary to De Jantjes, Een koninkrijk voor een huis! didn’t herald a new dawn for Dutch cinema. It would be another ten years before the Dutch film would come into its own again.