Here Comes Trouble! Jean Kent in Good Time Girl (1948)

 

Good Time Girl (1948)

In an effort to straighten out young delinquent Lyla (Diana Dors), Miss Thorpe (Flora Robson) tells the awful story of Gwen (Jean Kent), a 16 year-old who ran away from her violent home to work as a waitress in a night club owned by Max Vine (Herbert Lom). She is framed for robbery by the jealous Johnny Rosso and is sent to an Approved School. Escaping from there, she finds that Max has moved to Brighton. She hides out at his new club there, where she falls in with cheap gangster Danny Martin (Griffith Jones) and eventually a pair of murderous GI deserters.

There was definitely something in the air in post-war British cinema. Ticket sales were at an all-time high as troops began to return home to find there wasn’t much by way of entertainment apart from the pub and the cinema. During the war, film audiences had been largely female, and studios made films to cater for that audience; with the return of a males to the audience, many of whom had gone through traumatic wartime experiences, the types of film coming out of British studios changed radically over the course of a few years.

The baroque female-centred costume fantasies of Gainsborough Studios were replaced, for a variety of reasons, by a raft of sourly-realistic thrillers such as Appointment With Crime (1946) and, in the bumper year of 1947, They Made Me a Fugitive, Brighton Rock, Dancing With Crime and It Always Rains on Sunday. There was an extent to which this trend was aping what was happening in American cinema, where the films which would later become known as Film Noir were being made. For the best example of this witness the delirious 1948 film adaptation of James Hadley Chase’s scandalous crime novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Jack La Rue was imported as a sort of poor man’s Bogart, alongside any English actor (and newly arrived South African Sid James) capable of a reasonable approximation of an American accent. In general though, it seems to have been a case of similar influences being at work in both America and Britain.

Jack La Rue and Linden Travers in No Orchids for Miss Blandish

There was a short period where the womens picture and noir influences cross-pollinated, such as in the aforementioned It Always Rains on Sunday, a vehicle for Googie Withers, one of the top British female stars of the 40’s. Like Good Time Girl, this was adapted from a novel by Arthur La Bern who may not be a well-known writer today, but in his day was very successful. As well as the two films already mentioned Paper Orchid was adapted for the screen in 1949, while Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, a project La Bern loudly disapproved of, was adapted from his 1966 novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square. La Bern was also a scriptwriter for a while in the 1960s, among his projects being scripts for the BBC’s first ever filmed detective series Fabian of Scotland Yard in 1955 and from 1962 to 1964 writing four of the legendary Edgar Wallace Mysteries, which were popular b-picture attractions before being seen for years on television on both sides of the Atlantic.

Arthur La Bern's novel on which
Good Time Girl was based

A former Newspaper crime reporter, La Bern also wrote true crime books, a subject which also bled into his fiction, Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square having echoes of the infamous Hammersmith Nude Murders of 1964 and 65. His earlier work Night Darkens the Street, the source novel for Good Time Girl, is based in part on a famous murder case of the mid-40's known in the press as The Cleft Chin Murder. This involved a young waitress and sometime striptease dancer, Elizabeth Jones, who ran away from home at age thirteen and wound up in an Approved School (a sort of boarding school for youths deemed to be beyond parental control). By 3rd October 1944 Jones met Karl Hulten, a deserter from the US Army, in a tea shop. The two subsequently went on a six-day crime spree which ended when Hulten shot dead taxi driver George Edward Heath as part of a robbery attempt. Heath had no identification on his person when he was found, leading him to be known in the press as the man with the cleft chin'.

The Cleft Chin Murder case was so famous that
George Orwell wrote about it in 
The Decline of the English Murder

The fictional story of Good Time Girl sees Jones reimagined as Gwen (Jean Kent), a sassy but naïve 16-year-old (Kent was 27 at the time) who finds herself increasingly alcohol-dependent and passed among a fine array of creepy British character actors. From being sacked by her pervy boss Elwyn Brook-Jones, ostensibly for pilfering but really because she wouldn’t let him have his way with her, she is thrashed by her violent dad (played by George Carney in his last role: he died six months before Good Time Girl was released). This is a dark and disturbing scene very well-shot by director David MacDonald, who pulls off a similar scene of implied violence when creepy Spiv Johnny Rosso is the victim of a revenge attack that leaves him scarred for life.

Gwen leaves home, finding a room in a seedy boarding house and is immediately spotted by fellow lodger Johnny Rosso, played by Peter Glenville, who was so good as Stewart Granger’s despicable gigolo brother in Madonna of the Seven Moons. Here he is all slicked-back hair and carefully trimmed moustache as a malicious spiv working for nightclub owner Max Vine (Herbert Lom). For a post-war audience, Rosso’s appearance would have been loaded with meaning in ways which would not be so apparent today. Most of us in Britain only know the ‘Spiv’ characterisation, if at all, from the Private Walker character in the long-running and forever repeated sitcom Dad’s Army. In reality, during the war and the immediate post-war period the Spiv was a young, flashily-dressed type with connections to the black market who had somehow managed to avoid being drafted into the army. The Spiv might not exactly have been liked, but he was a useful chap to know for many ordinary people struggling with wartime rationing.

It’s honestly hard to imagine Johnny Rosso having access to much of anything, and he is so clearly a lecherous wrong ‘un that Gwen comes across as incredibly naïve for continually trusting him. Johnny gets Gwen a job at Vine’s nightclub, the waitress costume doing a fine job of showing off Jean Kent’s spectacular legs. Johnny seems to think that this has earned him rather more than a cheery ‘thank you’ from Gwen, who is knocked unconscious and given a black eye by Johnny during a failed rape attempt, which results in Johnny getting sacked by Vine.

Creepy Spiv Johnny Rosso gets rough with Gwen

Still Gwen takes some jewellery to the pawn shop for him. Naturally, the stuff has been stolen and Rosso has engineered the whole thing so that he can make a few quid while Gwen carries the can. It’s at times like this that we realise that, for all her bravado, Gwen is a child – a teenage girl who really doesn’t know how the world works. It says a lots for the grim nature of Good Time Girl that Rosso doesn’t get his just deserts. He does the dirty on Gwen, testifies against her at her trial when she is inevitably caught for flogging his stolen gear, then disappears from the narrative. I kept expecting him to reappear, but this isn’t Johnny’s story, it’s a tale about naïve tough-girl Gwen and her journey through the hands of various horrible men and into alcoholism and criminality.

The film at this point takes a sharp turn into Women in Prison territory, though as Gwen is (in theory at least) sixteen years old, she’s actually shipped off to Approved School for three years. There she meets up with school toughy Roberta (Jill Balcon), and after a rocky start the pair are pretty well running the place behind the backs of the overworked and easily-fooled staff. No Approved School can hold our Gwen, however, and she escapes during a fight in the school and heads back to Max’s club, only to find that he’s moved operations to Brighton.

Through all this, the one man who doesn’t want to use or control Gwen in some way is Red, piano player at Max’s London club, played by none other than Dennis Price. Price was about to have his breakthrough role in 1949’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, which itself was released only weeks after his disastrous miscasting in the title role of The Bad Lord Byron. He was terrible in the latter role of the famously ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ Romantic poet because if there was one thing that wasn’t in Price’s armoury as an actor it was any sense of sexual threat. That very lack of any romantic urgency informs the part of Red, who is written and played so much as the world-weary gay best friend that one raises an eyebrow when we learn that Red is married (if separated). A second eyebrow is raised when Red and Gwen passionately kiss each other before she is sent away to Approved School, not least because Price was aged 33 at the time and looked older, while Kent was playing a 16 year old.

Dennis Price - bursting with sexual energy!

To nightclub owner Herbert Lom, Gwen was always merely a commodity – he has no interest in her sexually and only protects her from the violent advances of Johnny because it affects his profits, since she can’t work with a black eye. When she escapes from Approved School and tracks him down to Brighton he doesn’t want to know, sensing that by this time Gwen represents nothing but a lot of trouble that he doesn’t need. Instead she winds up with small-time gangster Danny Martin (Griffith Jones), who lets Gwen drive drunk, as a result of which she mows down and kills a cycling policeman. She tries to escape Martin by train but he finds and beats her unconscious in her carriage in a strange, but powerfully shot, sequence that gives the impression that it is missing some footage. Jean Kent later confirmed that the scene had been written to contain an acid attack, but this was regarded as too much by the film censors of the time.

Herbert Lom stepping out of the shadows

Finally, with around 10 minutes of screen-time left, we reach the section based most directly on Elizabeth Jones, as Gwen is picked up by a pair of on-the-run GI deserters, who find her left beaten unconscious in a train carriage by Martin. The AWOL servicemen are played by Bonar Colleano and Hugh McDermott. Of course they are played by Colleano and McDermott – these were the absolute go-to guys to play any sort of slightly dodgy American in low-budget British cinema of the 40’s and 50’s. Colleano was near the beginning of his career playing cheap but likeable American crooks or low-ranked military types. He was a well-liked figure in British movies whose career was cut cruelly short by his death in a road accident at the age of only 34.  McDermott’s career was something of an oddity: a Scottish former golf pro, he took to acting in the 1930s and spent almost his entire career, which lasted until the early 1970s, playing American characters - naturally he had been one of the leads in No Orchids for Miss Blandish. I was amazed to discover he was Edinburgh-born!. The 1950’s were his prime years as a breezy presence in British b-pictures – in fact, when a down-on-his-luck David MacDonald needed an American lead for Devil Girl from Mars, five years on from Good Time Girl, it was Hugh McDermott he called upon.  

Bonar Colleano says a cheery hello

Hugh McDermott 
Scottish king of B-picture Americana!

Finally Gwen has reached rock bottom. The two GIs are hold-up merchants living from one robbery to the next, being chased by the US Army and the British police. As the dialogue indicates, even her looks are starting to go by now, thanks to her almost constant state of intoxication. Prison awaits as a grim certainty.

Happily, unlike a lot of British films from the period, Good Time Girl is available to view in an absolutely luminous print, which highlights Stephen Dade’s lovely, shadowy photography and the art direction from Maurice Carter and George Provis. The sets are really effective; for instance in the framing sequence authority figure Flora Robson and teenage tearaway Diana Dors are dwarfed by the highly detailed surroundings – MacDonald pulls his camera away to emphasise this, showing that the two women are tiny in comparison with the vast legal machine they are both now a part of. There is also a lovely set showing the outside of Max Vine’s London club, which shows the amount of care and attention that went into the production of Good Time Girl.

Flora Robson and future bad-girl superstar Diana Dors

Stephen Dade was David MacDonald’s regular cinematographer in this period, which represents probably director’s peak, and the two expensive box office failures that saw his career begin to decline. The Brothers (1947), Snowbound and Good Time Girl (both 1948) had proven popular, but the two big Sidney Box productions he directed in 1949, The Bad Lord Byron and Christopher Columbus, did very badly. The Bad Lord Byron’s failure was not entirely the fault of MacDonald, as it was the subject of a great deal of interference by Producer Sydney Box during filming and, as mentioned above, its central miscasting killed any impact the film might have had.  

Lord Byron - Bad!

It does seem a little unfair that MacDonald carried the can, as the output of Gainsborough (which these all basically were, even if Rank had begun phasing out the name) were never regarded as director-led films.  The Gainsborough melodramas show the limits of auteur theory: one never thinks of them as being Leslie Arliss, Arthur Crabtree or David MacDonald films. Gainsborough chief Maurice Ostrer was the guiding hand in the studio’s years of peak popularity, and the feel of the films changed considerably when Sidney Box replaced him.

Despite him getting the Gainsborough job on the strength of his hugely successful 1946 production The Seventh Veil (often described as the best melodrama Gainsborough never made), Box’s instincts were more towards realism, which was completely beside the point for the successful melodramas Gainsborough made under Maurice Ostrer. They had been wish-fulfilment fantasies, and making them more expensively with realistic fashions and sets did them no favours. Good Time Girl, with its contemporary setting and gritty realism, was actually much more in line with Sidney Box’s tastes than big costume productions which were going out of fashion anyway – the reasons for this are complex and multi-faceted and I’ll cover them in a future blog.

 

Good Time Girl Jean Kent

Good Time Girl comes from around the peak of Jean Kent’s career. She was a top star for a surprisingly short time, for several years being behind the likes of Margaret Lockwood and Patricia Roc in the pecking order at Gainsborough Studios. Kent’s appeal was quite different to other British female stars of the era, though. While Anna Neagle was practically royalty and Ann Todd (often described as ‘the British Garbo’ was icily attractive, Jean Kent had an earthy sensuality that was played up in publicity photos. A former dancer at the Windmill Theatre – as we see in Good Time Girl, she was blessed with magnificent legs – Kent was game for appearing in cheesecake photographs, which went some way towards securing a strong fan-base. Her fan-club was larger than that for her contemporaries, described by Melanie Williams in the book British Womens Cinema as having as many subscribers as The Spectator magazine. Jean Kent was, in fact, the biggest sex-symbol in 1940’s British Cinema.

Jean Kent in The Smugglers: always willing to show a bit of leg 

Her career soon declined, however, as British filmmaking went into a decline in the 1950s and what films were being made were on more masculine subjects, particularly war movies, which tended not to have strong female roles. The big new British stars of the fifties were hearty masculine types Kenneth More and Jack Hawkins, who suited the war films that were creating a set of national myths about the wartime experience. Meanwhile, by as soon as 1952, Kent was reduced to appearing in The Lost Hours, a second feature for Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker’s b-picture outfit Tempean. By 1956 she was still appearing in the occasional b-picture, but wasn’t even getting top billing, a fate not uncommon for British female stars of the 1940’s.

By this point Kent’s position as Britain’s cinema sex symbol has been taken over by Diana Dors, whose aggressive, platinum blonde sexuality was very much in tune with 1950’s tastes. Good Time Girl happened to be one of 17 year-old Dors’ earliest credited screen appearances, playing Lyla, the young girl to whom Flora Robson tells the awful story of Gwen Rawlings in an attempt to get her back on the straight and narrow. Dors quickly started getting bigger roles, and the following year acted as a late replacement for Kent in another David MacDonald picture, Diamond City, third-billed behind David Farrar and Honor Blackman. By 1956 it was Diana Dors who was playing the abused bad girl, getting the best critical notices of her career in Yield to the Night, while Kent was reduced to character parts on TV. But that’s a story for another blog.

With thanks to Jade Evans for invaluable research assistance