Stop Press Girl

This searing kitchensink drama exposes the harsh dark, underbelly of postwar Britain.

No I was just pulling your leg, this lightweight but amusing romantic comedy has a newspaper reporter involved with a woman that is cursed with an affliction – she stops all forms of mechanical machinery and is capable of telling the time without the aid of a clock. Henceforth she may be not all that marriageable for a newspaper man.

A set of rural English characters make up this whimsical film, the type of gentle B-grade farce that Britain used to be known for making before the 'orrible 60s and 70s.

Set in the sleepy little village of Slipford, "a village bypassed by progress", and described by the late David Shipman as "so silly it was not released". The use of the much-vaunted Dynamic Frame process makes this extraordinary folly look simultaneously cheap & amateurish and yet also rather avant-garde in the style of Karel Zeman's animated fantasies of the fifties and sixties.

And it's impossible not to like a film in which Basil Radford & Naunton Wayne keep popping up in cameo roles as 'The Mechanical Types'.

A very interesting plot and very well acted by all concerned. I did know someone who could not wear a watch as they always stopped so the plot does have a ring of truth to it. It runs along very nicely and has a great ending.

Sally Ann Howes is a pretty but ordinary girl, reared by her aunt and uncle, Joyce Barbour and John Robertson Justice. What she doesn't know is in the presence of every woman in her family, mechanical machinery stops: trains, planes, automobiles, newspaper presses, it doesn't matter. When her prospective fiance, Nigel Buchanan is informed of this, he runs back to his family clockmaking business in London, and Miss Howes follows, meets Gordon Jackson, and eventually becomes a celebrity.

It's a romantic comedy with a fantasy air, a type of story that became moderately popular in print after the Second World War, with writers like Ward Moore and Jack Finney dabbling in it. The subtext was almost invariably about the fragility of modern civilization and a nostalgic hankering for older, simpler times.

19-year-old Miss Howes is quite lovely. It would turn out that she was also quite talented for musical comedy, in the mode of her father, Bobby Howes. She would replace Julie Andrews on Broadway in MY FAIR LADY, and star on Broadway for several decades. Although her film career dribbled away after CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG with the end of the movie musical, she is still around and, in her 90th year, quite lovely.

Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne are also present in the movie, not playing Charters & Caldicott, but "the mechanicals", a pair of men always present when she stops a bus, as the motorman and conductor, or a train as the engineer and stoker. They look old and worn.

I need to comment on myriamlenys' review: The opening scenes were filmed in Finchingfield, a village near here. I have lived most of my 75 years in the area and can assure you that so soon after the war things were very run down and backward. It would be surprising if there were more than two cars in the area (e.g. local doctor), very few tractors (still horses), few radios and certainly no TV; a bus perhaps once a week, few strangers. The village is now a tourist honeypot and people even have mobile phones, which would not have lasted long with Jennifer around!