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.

There are some priceless hilarious moments in this ambiguous comedy about a young innocent girl who happens to have a disastrous influence on any kind of machinery. Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in a number of supporting roles play an important part in adding to the comedy. The idea is actually rather serious: who has not experienced the frustration when for instance a computer just will not cooperate? And you must suspect that somehow your second thoughts could have had some influence on the inexplicable problem, which no mechanic expertise can solve. When science stands powerless and logic doesn't work, there is always superstition. The most wonderful scene in this boosting of the problem is the cinema scene, both on screen, in the audience and in the projector room (with Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne). The idea is good and made the best of, and there are plenty of hearty laughs. James Robertson Justice as an implacable dentist and Gordon Jackson as rhe incorrigible journalist add to the entertainment while Sally Ann Howe's perfect innocence is the centerpiece.

During the 40's and 50's, Britain produced a series of delightfully goofy comedies. Some, such as Passport to Pimlico (1949), Whiskey Galore (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951), Genevieve (1953), The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), and The Green Man (1956), are well known. But others just as good, such as Let George Do It! (1940) and Stop Press Girl (1949), have been overlooked.

This latter deals with an unwitting young woman who somehow stops all machinery she is around. The idea is novel and the pacing never drags. Though, as the woman, Sally Ann Howes' performance is nothing special, Gordon Jackson, one of the most likeable actors ever to appear on screen, does a fine job as her ardent suitor. So do James Robertson Justice--who pepped up every picture he was in--and Joyce Barbour as Howes' uncle and aunt. (While they know about her power, neither has informed her of it.) And as reporter Jackson's rival, and frustrated want-to-be sweetheart, Sonia Holm is convincingly catty. Finally, that redoubtable English pair, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, perhaps best remembered from The Lady Vanishes (1938), show up in five enjoyable cameos as different sets of mechanical types: train operators, bus operators, watchmakers, cinema projectionists, and pilots.

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.

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'.