"Imagine - they say I'm aged 25-30!" scoffs 28 year old Jean Kent in the role of 16 year old Gwen Rawlings. Without knowing her real age, you'd scoff too. If a 30 year old Patricia Roc can play an 18 year old ingenue, all sweetness and honey, then an almost 30 year old Jean Kent is the ideal for a teenage runaway. A young Diana Dors also features in the film, as the recipient of Flora Robson's warning tale. Though ten years younger than Ms. Kent, they easily both pass for being the same age, without any stretch of the imagination.
I'd watch Ms. Kent read the phone book so I am openly admitting that I am terribly biased towards her, but I do believe that she sure gave one of her best performances in Good Time Girl. The character is almost an extension of some of her bit parts - what might happen to them if Phyllis Calvert or Margaret Lockwood were out of the picture, and she was given the film.
Poor Gwen is a victim of circumstance if ever there was one. First she borrows a brooch from work and is caught returning it. Since she won't sleep with the manager to keep him quiet, and he won't believe the truth, she is fired and in turn beaten by her father when he discovers this. She leaves home to stay at a boarding house and gets a new job through another man there, who also has designs on her. At this point, Gwen is still a sensible young lady and she pushes him away until he beats her up in a fit of rage - and it's her black eye that gets him fired. Vowing revenge, he leaves for a time but then returns briefly enough to frame her for a petty crime, and Gwen is sent to a reform school for three years. You really have to feel sorry for her because she's not at all a bad seed, just rebellious and headstrong. She doesn't get on the wrong side of the tracks until nearly the end of the movie, when all the bad types she's been hanging around with finally rub off on her and she joins a small crime ring. Alas, it is this one change of heart that ultimately ends in tragedy for Gwen.
Good Time Girl is an absolutely harrowing story and certainly one of the most gripping movies I've ever seen. 10/10
