Lisa Daniely is a mill girl in the Lancashire town of Hindle. On the week of her annual holiday, she goes with a friend to Blackpool, where she encounters Brian Worth, the son of owner of the mill where she works -- and an old friend of her father, Leslie Dwyer. She goes with him for a week at a hotel. When this is discovered, confusion and morality break loose.
It's at least the sixth screen version of Stanley Houghton's 1912 play; I count three earlier movie versions, and a couple of TV adaptations. This one spends a third of its length with cameraman Geoffrey Faithfull making what looks to be an advertising movie for Blackpool's tourist industry.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the story, its point and its position as a key work in the Manchester school, it's not so good. Miss Daniely doesn't even attempt a Lancashire accent, and those who insist on doing "the right thing" seem old-fashioned and small-minded. There's no sense of morality to be punctured, just reflex action and self-interest; even Ronald Adams as Jeffcote, who's meant to be proponent of the old morality, is largely reduced to a straw man. He tells his old friend Dwyer that the man who's wronged Miss Daniely will do the right thing before discovering it's his own son, and his insistence after discovering it seems a bit insincere for all its swiftness.
This is the sixth or seventh version of this show I have seen, including a later television version from the 1970s and a couple of stage versions. It suffers from its post-war attitude that of course, the times they are a-changing, and there's no real sense, even as she speaks the lines, that Miss Daniely has a skilled trade that makes her independent of any man. She's simply looking for a better one than the weak and self-indulgent Worth, one who will adore her utterly, and perhaps give her a black eye.
