GOOD TIME GIRL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 546, 9 December 1949, Page 13

GOOD TIME GIRL

(Rank-Eagle Lion) LTHOUGH it employs with some success techniques perfected by the Americans, this picture’ is also as British as a‘cup of afternoon tea (or should one say a bottle of gin). It is one of those sordid productions that wind in and out of murky police courts, night clubs, and cented rooms, taken over from Hollywood and given its own particular flavour by the British producers. Once again some solid acting is put in by the leading play-ers-Jean Kent as the young delinquent, Flora Robson (very efficient) as the woman magistrate and narrator, Dennis Price as an elegant gent (slightly tarnished, but still solid brass underneath) and Herbert Lom as the compellingly sinister proprietor of a shady haunt in the East End. i Spivs, thieves, black marketeers, razorslashing thugs, crooked pawnbrokers, and a cash value placed on sex-as a piece of social realism and a picture of the seamier side of life in London Good Time Girl contains the sort of thing that | was presumably displayed to an intensified degree in Brighton Rock. It is not surprising that it was banned in Aus- | tralia, although it has the "advantage | over Brighton Rock in that it presents | its story as an example of what the. authorities in ‘Britain are faced with in their attempts" "to salvage the wrecked lives Of badly brought-up youngsters who drift into crime." |The moral of the story is hammered home, although not without dramatic proportion. : The director, David Macdonald, is apparently an American on loan from the British studios of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and he knows his business well, although 3: lacks originality. Jean Kent’s port.ayal of a young girl gradually :liding down the primrose path from irresponsible innocence to irresponsible viciousness is a minor work of art. She gets so much sympathy out of the role that one ends up by condemning the society that connived at her ruin (in the reform school episode for instance) rather than the girl herself, who has in fact anything but a good time. Like My Brother Jonathan, Good Time Girl lacks~the glossy finish that the Americans put on their best films, but both should have an appeal of their own to a British audience.