Think of Chaplin's City Lights (1931), or Lewis Milestone's Hallelujah, I'm A Bum (1933) -- the latter a vehicle for Al Jolson and, in effect, his "answer" film to City Lights -- recast in the era of psychological awareness and you'll be able to wrap your mind around The Girl Who Couldn't Quite. Whether you'll think the latter activity worth doing is another issue.
The whole film is neither quite . . . comedy nor drama, but skittering between the two, and especially from drama to physical and slapstick comedy, from shot-to-shot and scene-to-scene as it works its way through a story of psychological trauma that might well have played much better as a shorter, somewhat more purely dramatic piece for television. Elizabeth Henson (whose screen career seems to have been confined almost entirely to television, apart from this starring role) plays the title character, a "teenager" (she was 23 when she did the part) who has not smiled since the age of five, and has been given to sudden fits of temper and aggression that have made her a blight on her family's existence and a terror for their long-suffering servants. In the opening 20 minutes of the movie, she's seemingly suffering from something akin to autism or PTSD, and is singularly sad and less than sympathetic. Only her chance spotting and hearing of a cheerfully self-reliant tramp (Bill Owen, in the best performance in the film) seems to bring her out of her perpetual miserable take on life and living, and her family engages the unwilling interloper to keep up his intervention. They overcome a lot of mistrust on his side and chaotic emotions on her side, and she eventually reaches a point where the source of her trauma is revealed, to the benefit of all except for Owen's tramp.
The author behind the work is Leo Marks, a former wartime cryptographer who was heavily involved with the defense of England during the Second World War, and who knew his way around psychological terms and subjects. His major work as a screenwriter was the script for Michael Powell's career-destroying thriller Peeping Tom, but he had numerous other strings to his bow. Here he seems to have wanted to tell a serious story (I haven't read his original play), but director co-screenwriter Norman Lee, who was better known for coarser, more comedic subjects going back to the 1930s, appears to have had other ideas. The resulting film is a strange mix, indeed, of amply-telegraphed slapstick and somber familial tensions, in which only Bill Owen as the carefree wanderer Tim rises above the limitations of the script and the direction.
There is also a bit more humor in here than may be obvious for some audiences in the twenty-first century, but wouldn't have been lost on viewers in 1950. The most telling of those moments is when the title-character's mother tries to draw Tim's attention to a particular book -- he nonchalantly and with a wicked gleam in his eye replies, "Miss Blandish -- I've read it!" referring to James Hadley Chase's notoriously salacious novel No Orchids For Miss Blandish (itself a rewrite of Faulkner's Sanctuary), which the same production company, Renown Films, had released in a film adaptation a couple of years prior to this. It's an inspired flash in the script -- I'm just not sure that it belonged in this particular script.
The whole film is neither quite . . . comedy nor drama, but skittering between the two, and especially from drama to physical and slapstick comedy, from shot-to-shot and scene-to-scene as it works its way through a story of psychological trauma that might well have played much better as a shorter, somewhat more purely dramatic piece for television. Elizabeth Henson (whose screen career seems to have been confined almost entirely to television, apart from this starring role) plays the title character, a "teenager" (she was 23 when she did the part) who has not smiled since the age of five, and has been given to sudden fits of temper and aggression that have made her a blight on her family's existence and a terror for their long-suffering servants. In the opening 20 minutes of the movie, she's seemingly suffering from something akin to autism or PTSD, and is singularly sad and less than sympathetic. Only her chance spotting and hearing of a cheerfully self-reliant tramp (Bill Owen, in the best performance in the film) seems to bring her out of her perpetual miserable take on life and living, and her family engages the unwilling interloper to keep up his intervention. They overcome a lot of mistrust on his side and chaotic emotions on her side, and she eventually reaches a point where the source of her trauma is revealed, to the benefit of all except for Owen's tramp.
The author behind the work is Leo Marks, a former wartime cryptographer who was heavily involved with the defense of England during the Second World War, and who knew his way around psychological terms and subjects. His major work as a screenwriter was the script for Michael Powell's career-destroying thriller Peeping Tom, but he had numerous other strings to his bow. Here he seems to have wanted to tell a serious story (I haven't read his original play), but director co-screenwriter Norman Lee, who was better known for coarser, more comedic subjects going back to the 1930s, appears to have had other ideas. The resulting film is a strange mix, indeed, of amply-telegraphed slapstick and somber familial tensions, in which only Bill Owen as the carefree wanderer Tim rises above the limitations of the script and the direction.
There is also a bit more humor in here than may be obvious for some audiences in the twenty-first century, but wouldn't have been lost on viewers in 1950. The most telling of those moments is when the title-character's mother tries to draw Tim's attention to a particular book -- he nonchalantly and with a wicked gleam in his eye replies, "Miss Blandish -- I've read it!" referring to James Hadley Chase's notoriously salacious novel No Orchids For Miss Blandish (itself a rewrite of Faulkner's Sanctuary), which the same production company, Renown Films, had released in a film adaptation a couple of years prior to this. It's an inspired flash in the script -- I'm just not sure that it belonged in this particular script.