More '40s/'50s British bad girls ...

PASSPORT TO SHAME & GOOD TIME GIRL .. We reported on the Italian WHITE SLAVE TRADE, an early Loren from 1952 recently, see below ... here's the British view in 1958, a white slavery expose,  - but first a delicious slice of '40s moralising ...

GOOD TIME GIRL. This essentially British post-war (1947) lurid melodrama is a rich treat now. Told as a cautionary tale by social worker Flora Robson to wayward teenager Diana Dors, it tells the story of Gwen, a nice girl initally who goes bad, it reads like one of those Hollywood movies starring Lana Turner or Susan Hayward in which they go spectacularly bad - and then pay and pay for it. MADAME X or I WANT TO LIVE have nothing on Jean Kent, 27 here playing a 16 year old. 

Dame Flora & Diana

Kent had a long career, her best role maybe as the unfaithful wife in the 1951 film of Rattigan's THE BROWNING VERSION, and in those Gainsborough dramas like CARAVAN and MADONNA OF THE SEVEN MOONS). Here she is at the BFI in 2011 when she was 90. ... 

http://www.silversirens.co.uk/jean-kent/jean-kent-introduce-caravan-the-bfi-t127/

Gwen is from a poor home with a downtrodden mother and violent father,  she likes nice things like that brooch she borrows and gets caught returning. After a final beating from her father on being fired from a job in a pawn shop, she runs away and gets an apartment in London. Soon she is working as hat-check girl in Herbert Lom's jazz nightclub. Among the men pestering her is Peter Glenville (who later turned director of films like BECKET). Poor Gwen is soon on a descent into a world of booze and sleazy men. She ends up in a reform school after being framed for a robbery, despite fairly nice guy Dennis Price trying to help her. Now she has to be really tough, as she tangles with head girl Roberta (Jill Balcon - so obviously Daniel Day Lewis's mother, with that profile...). Everything goes wrong as she escapes and falls in with more bad company, back with Herbert Lom and his new nightclub in louche Brighton. Soon she is running around with a local gang, and then with 2 GI's on the make who will stop at nothing, including murder .... as poor Gwen is framed again and dragged off for a longer sojurn inside. Suitably warned off a life of crime, young Diana heeds Dame Flora's advice, and heads for home. Boy, how they must have enjoyed that back then ...

Reform school girls

Jean Kent is terrific and totally believable as the willful teenager and party girl. She's as good as any tough girl in any Hollywood film. Supporting cast offers a few great roles here: Griffith Jones, Herbert Lom as the nightclub owner; Bonar Colleano, Beatrice Varley is good as the hapless mother, and Amy Vaness (the spiteful mother-in-law in THIS HAPPY BREED) as the landlady.  Its a delicious panorama of 1940s British moviemaking, as directed by David McDonald, and written by Ted Willis and Muriel Box, and it should be as well-known as BRIGHTON ROCK or IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY (see 1940s label). 

PASSPORT TO SHAME. Totally lurid 1958 melodrama about the evils of prostitution in London, this is a delirious trash classic now. A decade on from GOOD TIME GIRL Herbert Lom has graduated to the role of Nick Biaggi, the local Mr Big, a super-pimp controlling his street girls, as aided by the wonderful Brenda de Banzie. Among their girls is Diana Dors again, now in her late '50s prime, a day-glo blonde poured into some amazing costumes - it seems she did not follow Dame Flora's advice after all; street girls surely didn't look this good? Diana is Vicki, a good-natured girl whose kid sister fell foul of Biaggi and his cohorts as she bides her time to take her revenge on them.  Enter Odile Versois, as a very naive French girl Malou who is soon in Biaggi's grip after going through a fake wedding with a taxi driver in trouble - Eddie Constantine.  Odile is rather homely, Mylene Demongeot may have been a better choice ...

Highlights include Malou's drug-induced dream or nightmare, and all the taxi-drivers (Joan Sims is the radio controller) going to the rescue of Malou from the swish residence of Herbert, who is soon dangling on the roof as a fire takes control ... 

Another Dors treat?

the firemen attempt a rescue, will our hero Eddie reach Herbert first? Lets just say there is a happy ending for our two couples - yes Vicki finds a regular guy who will love her too - leaving poor Brenda to wail on the street as the money flies around her. This is simply a genuine British Trash Classic, as helmed by the prolific Alvin Rakoff, and has to be seen to be believed. The other couple being married (left, above) when Malou and Eddie turn up are only the young Michael Caine and Anne Reid - before she went into CORONATION STREET as Ken Barlow's first wife, soon to be electrocuted, and now one of our senior actresses.