Rag Doll

The Young Ones

The Johnny Leyton Touch

March

With remarkable tenacity, the Mancunian Film Corporation survived up to the mid-sixties, having at last turned its back on the ‘low’ comedy pictures of Frank Randle, Norman Evans, Sandy Powell, and associates. The line was effectively drawn at the start of the decade with Rag Doll, enticingly retitled Young, Willing and Eager for the American market. This and Mancunian’s next production The Painted Smile were directed by Lance Comfort: two slightly drawn, downbeat, melancholy social dramas that exhibited Comfort’s conscious concession to the era of pop music, followed by his Band of Thieves (1962) and Live It Up (1963) and reaching a sort of apogee with Be My Guest (1965).

Brian McFarlane has recognised that ‘In all of these unremarkable, but not unenjoyable, programme fillers, which represent the most strained circumstances in which Comfort as a director for the cinema would work, there are recurring incidental pleasures.’ There is a good supply of them in Rag Doll with its typical Comfort protagonist, young crook Joe Shane (Jess Conrad), ‘who, for reasons of naivety or other sorts of disadvantage, is made vulnerable to criminal intentions’.

The picture may be remarkable only for the obvious care that Comfort bestows on it. Produced by Tom Blakeley at Walton-on-Thames, it has a screenplay by Brock Williams and Derry Quinn, from Williams’s original story. Not without justification, the MFB thought that ‘it wastes no time on things like conviction and characterisation, but achieves nothing compensatory either’. Inhabiting seedy transport cafés on the North Circular, London’s alluring illuminations, and subterranean nightclubs of dubious intent, it is a morality tale of unhappy seventeen-year-old Carol (Christina Gregg), who runs away from home. She is courted by successful businessman Mort Wilson (Kenneth Griffith) but irresistibly attracted to wannabe pop singer Joe, despite Mort informing her that ‘A pop-singer is only a cowboy once removed.’ The simplistic developments are expertly portrayed by a cast with the benefit of Hermione Baddeley as an ageing tart with a heart of gold, and Patrick Magee briefly seen but brilliant as Carol’s sozzled dad.