A Boy, a Girl and a Bike

'Appen this is of it's time and place, and no mistake. The torrid world of Northern bicycle clubs comes under the unflinching gaze of director Ralph Smart with some vigour for a good hour and 25 minutes. Then, suddenly, it just can't be arsed to pedal any further and wraps up one plot strand with unseemly haste while leaving another dangling. At least the interesting cast and breezy tone keeps it watchable.

This film is a very good representation of a northern England mill town of post WW2. The characters although credible are not typical of the peoples found in the area at the time. This movie was filmed in and around my local town and as a historical aid it is valuable though not wholly reliable.

Didn't Diana Dors look so nice before they dyed her hair and made her into some kind of English Monroe? She reminded me of a very young Lana Turner here. And John McCallum. Whoa, boy! Plenty of nice shots of him in those little shorts and bathers raised my rating of this up to a 9. This film isn't really "a" boy, "a" girl or "a" bike, it's many. Ada and her many admirers, Charlie and his Ginger, Susie and her Sam and David, vying for her affections.. There seemed to be a few minor plots going on before they struck the big one - Charlie being in debt and stealing a bike to cover it, naturally he steals one with unique brake wires that is easily identifiable, naturally David buys said bike and everything ends up pear-shaped - but it's definitely a lot of fun to watch!

When I first learned during the early seventies that Honor Blackman had starred in something called 'A Boy, a Girl and a Bike', my fevered young imagination had conjured up a fetishistic Kenneth Anger-like fantasy or an erotic drama like 'Girl on a Motorcycle'. But 'The Wild One' this ain't.

This was actually the only feature film produced by documentary maker Ralph Keene, shot on location in North Yorkshire with the youthful Miss Blackman struggling with a northern accent as a mill worker who spends her weekends in shorts on a bicycle rather than in leather straddling a Harley-Davidson.

The film makes the tiny workers' homes (through the windows of which it always seems to be night and there are chimneys perpetually belching out smoke) look painfully cramped, lacking in privacy, and just the sort of places from which to escape into the Dales at every possible opportunity.

It's a measure of the film's incredible age that Blackman was still sweet and demure in those days, and that the Bad Girl is a plump, pouting young Diana Dors ("built for pleasure", as one fellow observes).

When John McCallum's roadster damages Honor Blackman's bicycle, he takes a liking to the mill girl. However, this annoys her boyfriend, Patrick Holt.

There are a lot of subplots in this story about a Yorkshire bicycling club, and a lot of handsome trucking shots of its members, particularly the ladies from behind, especially eighteen-year-old Diana Dors. the Yorkshire town and its environs are beautifully shot by DP Ray Elton, recently graduated from documentary shorts. He would later become a documentary producer.

Mostly though, it comes off as a paean to post-war prosperity. Like the Huggetts series, it's about the dances and bicycling and good times, now that the war was past, even as Miss Blackman's father wrangles with his mother-in-law about his sweets rations and control of the radio dial. the times are changing, and even though McCallum's parents are old-fashioned and snobby, his interest in Miss Blackman smacks of a new, classless society. Anyway, it's fresh-faced, 24-year-old Honor Blackman, best remembered now for being a Bond Girl and for THE AVENGERS.