Penny and the Pownall Case

This is a delightful wartime comedy in which a bimbo fashion model outsmarts a gang of Nazi supporters operating in Britain. Fortunately for British morale at the time, Penny spends a great deal of time changing her clothes in front of the camera. The story is really a mere excuse to parade this good looking young woman on screen, but it's done ever so tastefully and with tongue firmly in cheek. Ironically, future sex symbol Diana Dors is cast as a dowdy secretary at this early stage of her career.

The premise for the film is rather cute, a beautiful bimbo getting herself in the center of an international espionage adventure. The movie is quite quick with a surprising amount of sexual innuendo and lingering shots of the striking and well lit Peggy Evans in high fashion and states of undress verging on gratuitous. Evans' acting for such a litterally comic roll is commendable, but cannot be said for the male lead, even his reaction shots are remarkably poor.

An interesting curiousity is that Penny is seen in a bikini with briefs that cover her sacred belly button, however, in the comics drawn for her in the film, she wears a relatively modern bikini (tight fit and cut).

Possibly worth looking at if no other movie is running just to see what a gratuitous film looked like post-war era. Not worth going out of your way to see or even wasting the time to program your VCR.

The Rank Company of Youth (the Charm School) was not based at the Highbury Studios. It was located in a rather grubby church hall a few hundred yards away. In a 1982 BBC-tv documentary presented by Barry Norman the likes of Diana Dors and Barbara Murray spoke of how unglamorous it was. It was alleged that male and female changing was behind curtains at either end of the hall, and that the toilet facilities were at the Highbury Studios! This first manifestation of the Charm School closed around 1949 when Rank was making economies. The Highbury Studios were closed at that time too.

Peggy Evans is a model for Christopher Lee; he draws a comic strip for a newspaper which seems to specialize in showing Miss Evans in sunsuits, raising her skirts, and so forth. She a fiend for mysteries, and when Detective Inspector Ralph Michael drops by to ask Lee some questions about a kidnapping that has turned into a murder, she's so fascinated she agrees to go with Lee to sunny Spain for modelling. Soon, however, she finds herself involved with much more dangerous people, smuggling Nazis out of Europe.

The racy comic strip is based on Norman Pett's strip about Jane, a young woman who found herself on the pages of the Mirror in states of undress. Pett's wife was the original model, but she developed an interest in golf and was replaced by Chrystabel Leighton-Porter. Pett gave up the strip in 1948, and it continued for another eleven years.

This is the only directorial effort of Slim Hand. Far less revealing than the comic strip, and utterly conventional, it's a fairly wan second feature at 47 minutes.

`Penny & the Pownall Case' runs barely 45 minutes yet when it ended I felt that I had watched a feature film if only because of the glimpses we are afforded of life in that long-ago post-war England.

For instance when Penny is asked to fill in a form she responds `You're worse than the Food Office', a reference to rationing of groceries prevalent then. And a comment on the weather brings the response ` We've only just begun Double Summer Time, its still winter'

Interesting to see brunette Diana Dors in a secondary part. She was plump and mousy then but was there a spark of Britain's first blonde bombshell or is it just the benefit of hindsight?

And an alarmingly youthful but unmistakably Saturnine Christopher Lee was already typecast as a villain.

The plot concerns fleeing Nazi war criminals and a newspaper comic strip obviously based on the Daily Mirror's famous scantily clad `Jane'

Made at Highbury Studio on a rationed budget `Penny...' is at the most a dated curiosity.