A Boy, a Girl and a Bike

This film is a very good representation of a northern England mill town of post WW2. The characters although credible are not typical of the peoples found in the area at the time. This movie was filmed in and around my local town and as a historical aid it is valuable though not wholly reliable.

I saw the film in our local cinema in Paddington in 1949, when I was nearly 13 and a keen cyclist. All of us young boys rated it highly, not least for the unique way the rear brake cable was routed to the brake via a small pilot tube within the bike's top tube. It was the first time that we had seen the young Diana Dors (I think she was 16 at this time) and a real head-turner. Honor Blackman spoke with a creditable Yorkshire accent and I particularly remember the scene when, after having a puncture, she asks John McCullum to "pass the patches and solution". Years later I met Miss Blackman when she was learning to fly at my flying club, Flairavia, at Biggin Hill in 1964 after having just played the part of Pussy Galore in "Gold Finger" - she couldn't remember saying those (to me) immortal lines from the 1949 film! I think the film has stood the test of time and is well worth viewing to remind us how we all lived.

Peter Woodman.

Quite a nice film about a long lost past which although sombre for those without much money, was socially rich and enjoyable. Pursuits were predominantly outdoors (no TV), and the Saturday night dances. Others have commented about Diana Dors in this film. I personally thought that the then 22 year old Honor Blackman was the belle of the film, with a passable local accent.

The film has a somewhat rushed ending, with some plot lines not being resolved, while others are brought to fruition. For me, another ten minutes to better resolve the ending would have helped. This is a shame - perhaps the producers ran out of money or a key cast member had other commitments elsewhere?

I try to be objective with my marks for the films I occasionally review on this website, but on this occasion my vote of 9 comes from the heart. The film came out in 1949, just ten years before I started cycling, but it evokes a bygone age,when the postwar roads were free of traffic and cycling was carefree (even if the industrial settings and living conditions portrayed in the film were grim). The film struck a further chord with me because like its hero I came from a posh background and my family frowned on me mixing with those common rough types. It's a gentle film of a long-lost age - even though it starts with what today what would be a road-rage incident - McCallum hoots aggressively at the club run as he motors along, only then for him to stall his car and to be gently mocked by the cyclists as they overtake him; today such an incident would provoke swearing if not physical contact.

The race at the film's end is well-staged, though at a cyclists' filmshow some years ago the close-ups of the competitors against back projection provoked much mirth (but then comparable shots of horse-riders also look artificial in old films, with the riders bouncing up-and-down on saddles in the studio).

Like RitaRisque in her preceding review, I too thought a young Diana Dors looked very nice, as did Honor Blackman. And the supporting cast is a delight for those of us who like to spot British character actors.

When I first learned during the early seventies that Honor Blackman had starred in something called 'A Boy, a Girl and a Bike', my fevered young imagination had conjured up a fetishistic Kenneth Anger-like fantasy or an erotic drama like 'Girl on a Motorcycle'. But 'The Wild One' this ain't.

This was actually the only feature film produced by documentary maker Ralph Keene, shot on location in North Yorkshire with the youthful Miss Blackman struggling with a northern accent as a mill worker who spends her weekends in shorts on a bicycle rather than in leather straddling a Harley-Davidson.

The film makes the tiny workers' homes (through the windows of which it always seems to be night and there are chimneys perpetually belching out smoke) look painfully cramped, lacking in privacy, and just the sort of places from which to escape into the Dales at every possible opportunity.

It's a measure of the film's incredible age that Blackman was still sweet and demure in those days, and that the Bad Girl is a plump, pouting young Diana Dors ("built for pleasure", as one fellow observes).