Good Time Girl
- Film Reviews
(Featuring Jean Kent, Flora Robson,
Dennis Price, Griffith Jones, Herbert lorn.) It is interesting to compare this film with that famous and infamous production, No Orchids for Miss Blandish. It is so similar in its theme of violence, so different in its treatment of that theme. The same unanimity in dubbing No Orchids a bad film will probably be found, this time in praise of Good Time Girl. For this is a moving and convincing film where the characters live as human creatures, a mixture of tragedy, glamour and humour.
The same cockney vigour and the back answers of It Always Rains on Sunday are here again; the side alleys, the street musician, the slum bedroom, as also the night clubs and mink coats, are things of reality and they combine to tell a pitiful tale.
Now should this film be censored as well as No Orchids ? If it is Art that determined the censor’s actions, then let Miss Blandish suffer alone, for she was an unreal creature in whom no one could believe. But if it is public morality that is his concern, one may question whether the sight of motiveless brutality is as dangerous as the violence in Good Time Girl which is the outcome of tremendous feeling, powerfully conveyed to the audience.
But a more important question for readers of this journal is: What impression does this film give of our psychological and social services ? It is difficult to believe that it is anything but alarming and the fact that in all other respects the film presents such a true picture of life makes this the more regrettable. The Juvenile Court and the Approved School are seen from the point of view of the unreformed girl, and I should think that, after seeing this film, most of the audience would greet with undisguised incredulity the statement, ” Many girls after leaving an Approved School do lead honest lives.” For here the girl’s horror as she exclaims, ” Three years in an Approved School ! ” received a sympathetic gasp from the audience. We shared her feeling that the building was a prison and we shared her many humiliations on arrival, when, for instance, the matron and doctor talked across her while her hair was being examined, when she was forced to wear institutional clothes and ordered to say, ” Good morning, Mrs. Bond ” as the long line of girls filed past the housekeeper in the morning. To us as to her, the staff seemed cold, inhuman, thin-lipped, the policewoman seemed rough and callous and the probation officer prudish and shocked at the sight of an embrace. Then too the staff appeared to be so easily taken in, and psychologists will feel sad that their appearance coincided with the beginning of the girl’s real deterioration. ” I have arranged for you to see the psychologist in the morning,” ” Thank you, matron,” says Gwen meekly, and as the matron smiles with pleasure that the girl has at last put aside her truculence and is becoming amenable, a very ugly smile appears on Gwen’s lips at the ease of her deception.
On reflection, one recalls that the two ” bad ” girls are the exceptions and that the rest, though breaking into disorder on the slightest pretext, do not seem unhappy at the School or on bad terms with the staff. One remembers too, as an afterthought, that the matron showed herself to be really concerned for her charges in her conversations with the rest of the staff and in committee, that the chairman of the Juvenile Court, who tells the story of the film as an awful example to another girl, is a humane woman too. But these are afterthoughts, and the conscious afterthoughtsof one deliberately trying to see what can be said on the other side. At the time of seeing the film, the miscarriage of justice and our sympathy with the victim create a feeling of hostility to the forces of authority, in particular the Approved School with its attendant Probation Officers and Psychologists.
P.E.W. The Centre.
This short film, directed by Paul Rotha for the Central Office of Information on behalf of the Foreign Office, is an account of the Peckham Health Centre, the first experiment to study health, as Dr Scott Williamson, the founder, claims. It shows the fine, light buildings and the activities earned on inside, the gym., swimming baths, billiard room, cafetaria, etc., mainly as they are seen through the eyes of one family that joins the Centre. This family is divided in its attitude towards the Centre and one sees how the principles of the experiment work out in their lives: no compulsion to follow the advice given by the doctor, in fact no conditions of membership except the annual medical examination and a small weekly subscription. The conditions that are believed to be those of the happy, healthy life are provided, and the scientists watch the result.
Perhaps men tend to feel that their leisure activities should be spontaneous and that such an organized experiment smacks of interference, although the truth is that the social activities which were a natural growth in England have suffered a rude interruption and it may be that only by some such deliberate action can a healthy social life be brought to the suburbs of our towns. The film does prompt such serious questioning, but, perhaps inevitably, a picture of this kind has a selfconscious air that is something of an embarrassment to an English audience. It may have been inevitable too that such a film should show the conversion of the hostile onlooker into an enthusiastic member with such immediately good results that the audience stirred uneasily. But the film only lasts twenty minutes and most of the actors are members of the Centre, not professional actors, and within these limitations a convincing picture is given of the atmosphere of friendliness and the improvement in health that does take place at the Centre.
One small piece of criticism may be added. It is stated at the beginning of the film that Peckham was chosen because within it were to be found families with incomes ranging from the highest to the lowest, but it did not seem clear from the film that in fact The Centre was used by families of largely differing incomes. P.E.W.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.