A Girl Must Live

(1939, GB, 92m, b/w)
d Carol Reed p Edward Black sc Frank Launder ph Jack Cox ed R.E. Dearing ad Vetchinsky m Louis Levy cast Margaret Lockwood, Renée Houston, Lilli Palmer, George Robey, Hugh Sinclair, David Burns, Mary Clare

In this terrifically funny offering from Reed, Margaret Lockwood escapes from a Swiss boarding school to make it on the London stage. Rooming with two chorus girls, she’s quickly on her way and piquing the curiosity of the handsome (and rather louche) Earl of Pangbourne, object of several voracious attentions. A girl must live in a manner to which she could become accustomed, but she must also live and have a good time with it. Launder’s script frequently shifts up to breakneck pace, a rare match for Sturges, and equally unsentimental; like Sturges also, there’s terrific and memorable support right through the cast. Specially introduced at the beginning, Houston and Palmer’s gold-diggers are marvelously unscrupulous, Burns and Robey are particularly good when drunk, and Lockwood rises calmly above the screwy antics going on around her. An unusually flip, brash, sexy and self-assured English comedy, that can almost live up to the (American) Burns’s comment on the grand Baronial Hall set – “it’s better than Hollywood”. And the costumes are sensational!

© Time Out Film Guide