STOP PRESS GIRL (1946)
Article 3146 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-23-2010
Posting Date: 3-26-2010
Directed by Michael Barry
Featuring Sally Ann Howes, Gordon Jackson, Basil Radford
Country: UK
What it is: Romantic comedy with a fantasy premise

A young woman leaves her backwards hometown to go to London to find a runaway suitor. What she doesn’t know is that she has inherited a strange ability; if she’s in the vicinity of a machine for more than fifteen minutes, it stops working.

If I wanted, I could harbor on the inconsistencies of the concept; for example, she lives with her dentist uncle, and it would seem to me that a dentist would find it hard to ply his trade if his drill constantly stopped working. However, that’s probably nitpicking in a movie that’s aspiring mostly towards being a screwball romantic comedy. It’s not bad, but I’d have liked it better if it dropped the romantic angle and more thoroughly explored the comic possibilities of the concept. The movie does use one idea that popped into my mind while watching it; I wondered what would happen if the woman got on board a plane, and that does happen. However, I would have used that as a climax to the story; here it occurs towards the middle of the movie, and I personally think the movie loses steam after this sequence. My favorite character was the heroine’s uncle, played by James Robertson Justice, who likes his dentist profession perhaps just a little too much. The movie features a small role for Kenneth More, who would go on to bigger and better things.