secondtake Good Time Girl (1948)This movie has so many turns and developments it's hard to remember everything by the time you get to the sensational terrible end. A girl leaves home to escape her father's beatings and one thing leads to another down the line. It's post-war England, and there are fun echoes of similar post-war American movies, complete with thugs and nightclubs and G.I.s on the lam.This leading actress Jean Kent starts off seeming a little strained, and you should make sure you give the movie a chance. It only gets better as it goes. It never quite strains credibility even though the events gets pretty unsavory. The photography, much of it at night, is vivid and fluid, the acting generally excellent, and the strength of ideas is wonderful. This really is a harrowing tale of social mis-steps all along. It's meant to be a cautionary tale, too. Literally. It's all told in a flashback to another young woman who is about to repeat the fate of the main character. Kent turns out to be pretty amazing in this film, ranging through several phases of her young life on camera--from innocent girl to hardened juvenile to a kind of moll without a gang. I liked it a lot.

JohnHowardReid What is film noir? The genre has been described by a number of eminent critics as a movie, predominantly photographed in low-key lighting, and set in the "unstable universe" of the crime underworld in which "frightened, fugitive characters struggle to survive." Film noir has a cohesive visual style. Dark, brooding images reinforce the noir movie's overall downbeat mood. The other consistent aspect of the genre can be found in its protagonists. They are usually ordinary people—good people at heart. Often alienated from society, they yet find themselves hopelessly entrapped (either through no fault of their own at all or a very minor failing) in the very milieu from which they are desperately trying to escape. The more they struggle against their fate, the deeper they sink into the swamp.A masterpiece of the genre, Good-Time Girl is one hundred per cent film noir. The movie outraged censors in its day and it still packs a tremendous wallop. A scathing indictment of the British justice system, the movie presents us with an ill-fated heroine (most expressively acted by Jean Kent).The nightmarish film noir quality of the story is abetted by the unique device of having it narrated in a perfectly straight fashion by the very same hideous person who sent our innocent heroine to the Dickensian reformatory. What is even more horrifying is that the brutal, brainless, totally insensitive and remarkably evil Flora Robson character uses the harrowing story neither to accuse herself nor to deny her own prime involvement in this shattering and totally inexcusable miscarriage of justice. Instead, she regards it as her "duty" to use it to point an unacceptable moral to all young girls to stay at home – even though they may be independent and earning a good wage – and put up with all the filth and squalor and brutality of the slums. It's impossible to reconcile Robson's "moral" with good sense, let alone justice and equity. No wonder the Australian censor banned the film!The filmmakers themselves admitted in a synopsis provided to the Library of Congress that their movie was an exposé of British "justice" in which the innocent victim is brutalized at every turn until finally she is put away for a fifteen-year stretch for a crime in which she was a most unwilling accomplice.These disturbing elements are driven home by a series of brilliant performances: Jean Kent as the beleaguered heroine; Peter Glenville as her spivvy accuser; Jill Balcon as "king" of the reform school; Flora Robson as the vicious magistrate; Beatrice Varley as the heroine's mother; Elwyn Brook-Jones as her lecherous employer; Griffith Jones as the vengeful Danny; and Danny Green (we see only his back, but what an expressive back it is)!David MacDonald is not normally a director that I would go out of my way to salute, but in this case he has directed with force, pace and imaginative flair, aided by superbly noirish black and white camera-work and some marvelously atmospheric sets.

Alex da Silva The Juvenile Court chairman (Flora Robson) recounts a story to Lyla (Diana Dors) to put her off a life of crime. We follow the story of Gwen (Jean Kent) as she runs away from home and gets mixed up with shady characters. Each situation that she finds herself in leads to new tragedies until the end where she accidentally meets up with Red (Dennis Price) again, the only man that she has ever loved. However, she is now part of a ruthless gang - she tries to save Red from his fate at the hands of this gang but things have now gone too far out of control. At the end of the film, Lyla decides she doesn't want a life like Gwen's and agrees to go home to her parents....This is a fast-moving film. We have at least four separate sections which involve Gwen and a different set of friends as she drifts through life. The cast are good and we are taken through a world of nightclubs, street gangs, playboys, borstal, soldiers on the run and we also have a doomed love interest. No-one does well in this film and I mean NO-ONE. It's a downbeat film but enjoyable.

drednm The 27-year-old Jean Kent plays 16-year-old Gwen in this excellent and harrowing British film that looks at the downfall of a good-time girl.Told as a cautionary tell by Flora Robson (a court officer) to Diana Dors (a possible delinquent), the story of Gwen combines parts of all those Hollywood movies starring Lana Turner or Susan Hayward in which the good girl goes bad---and PAYS for it.Gwen is a well-meaning girl who comes from a violent home and likes nice things. 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. There she meets a man who gets her a job in a nightclub. From then on she's on a descent into a world of booze and sleazy men. She never really does anything wrong but she crosses the wrong guy and he gets even by framing her in a jewel heist. She's sent to a reform school, learns to be really tough, and escapes to live an even wilder life of men and booze. The final sequence of events is mesmerizingly horrible as Gwen gets framed one last time.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, usually a nice guy, plays a sadistic thug; Jill Balcon (mother of Daniel Day-Lewis) is great as the vicious Roberta; Herbert Lom is subdued as Maxie the nightclub owner; Beatrice Varley is good as the hapless mother; Dennis Price is memorable as Red; and Flora Robson scores again as the court official.Just a terrific little film.....