Stop Press Girl

On the outside, Jennifer appears to be a normal girl. However, she has a special power which is so far unknown to her, it's hereditary and passed down through the females of the family: the power to stop ALL machinery. It takes 15 minutes to do so, and does not work if she is asleep, those are the only 'rules'. Now this doesn't affect her so much as she lives in a sleepy little town that is still all horse and cart, but her boyfriend is a watch maker who owns a car, so there's some problems there (that just seem odd coincidences since neither of them know), but when Jennifer goes away to London, that's when the real fun starts!

A lovely little English screwball comedy, and see if you recognise Jennifer as Truly Scrumptious from 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' - 20 years younger. 10/10!

Sally Ann Howes is a pretty but ordinary girl, reared by her aunt and uncle, Joyce Barbour and John Robertson Justice. What she doesn't know is in the presence of every woman in her family, mechanical machinery stops: trains, planes, automobiles, newspaper presses, it doesn't matter. When her prospective fiance, Nigel Buchanan is informed of this, he runs back to his family clockmaking business in London, and Miss Howes follows, meets Gordon Jackson, and eventually becomes a celebrity.

It's a romantic comedy with a fantasy air, a type of story that became moderately popular in print after the Second World War, with writers like Ward Moore and Jack Finney dabbling in it. The subtext was almost invariably about the fragility of modern civilization and a nostalgic hankering for older, simpler times.

19-year-old Miss Howes is quite lovely. It would turn out that she was also quite talented for musical comedy, in the mode of her father, Bobby Howes. She would replace Julie Andrews on Broadway in MY FAIR LADY, and star on Broadway for several decades. Although her film career dribbled away after CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG with the end of the movie musical, she is still around and, in her 90th year, quite lovely.

Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne are also present in the movie, not playing Charters & Caldicott, but "the mechanicals", a pair of men always present when she stops a bus, as the motorman and conductor, or a train as the engineer and stoker. They look old and worn.

Set in the sleepy little village of Slipford, "a village bypassed by progress", and described by the late David Shipman as "so silly it was not released". The use of the much-vaunted Dynamic Frame process makes this extraordinary folly look simultaneously cheap & amateurish and yet also rather avant-garde in the style of Karel Zeman's animated fantasies of the fifties and sixties.

And it's impossible not to like a film in which Basil Radford & Naunton Wayne keep popping up in cameo roles as 'The Mechanical Types'.

There are some priceless hilarious moments in this ambiguous comedy about a young innocent girl who happens to have a disastrous influence on any kind of machinery. Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in a number of supporting roles play an important part in adding to the comedy. The idea is actually rather serious: who has not experienced the frustration when for instance a computer just will not cooperate? And you must suspect that somehow your second thoughts could have had some influence on the inexplicable problem, which no mechanic expertise can solve. When science stands powerless and logic doesn't work, there is always superstition. The most wonderful scene in this boosting of the problem is the cinema scene, both on screen, in the audience and in the projector room (with Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne). The idea is good and made the best of, and there are plenty of hearty laughs. James Robertson Justice as an implacable dentist and Gordon Jackson as rhe incorrigible journalist add to the entertainment while Sally Ann Howe's perfect innocence is the centerpiece.

I need to comment on myriamlenys' review: The opening scenes were filmed in Finchingfield, a village near here. I have lived most of my 75 years in the area and can assure you that so soon after the war things were very run down and backward. It would be surprising if there were more than two cars in the area (e.g. local doctor), very few tractors (still horses), few radios and certainly no TV; a bus perhaps once a week, few strangers. The village is now a tourist honeypot and people even have mobile phones, which would not have lasted long with Jennifer around!