A 12 year old girl is in a waiting room. A man walks past her, does a double-take and orders her to stand up. He also demands she turn around. Has the proper reaction to this ever not been to knee the jerk in the balls and run?
Sally Ann Howes plays Fennis Wilson, a girl destined to star in a movie even though she doesn’t want to be actress. As she tries to explain to a persistent director: “I have other plans.” “What plans?” “Secret plans.”
She is very direct and plain speaking—perhaps too direct for people in an enterprise rooted in deception. That guy who first saw her is irritated she won’t answer his many questions with the kinds of answers he expects from people seeking film work. “Are you dumb or trying to be funny?” Her reply: “Neither.”
This is 1943’s Thursday’s Child, a UK Pathé drama-comedy (roughly 75% the former) about this sincere young girl who refuses to be compromised by the studio system. I guess Hollywood isn’t the only town that loves to make movies about themselves.
Fennis refuses to have her brown locks dyed. She won’t let the studio change her last name. She didn’t even want to be in the movie. So why was the studio so insistent she be a star, anyways?
It was her older sister that was at the studio auditioning in vain when Fennis was discovered. In what would be a bitter rivalry in a lesser picture, the relationship between these sisters is more subtle and complicated here. The older sister is jealous, but she tries to temper it and you can see her straining to do so.
There’s a nice scene I like between these two characters in the older sister’s bedroom late at night. Fennis eats some sandwiches while talking to her and says, “I wonder why things taste extra delicious after midnight.” I like that. And it’s true.
The greater conflict is between the stern father (Wilfrid Lawson) and each of his children. He demands his son continue the family business. He refuses to let the older sister even appear as an extra in a picture, even when Fennis is starring in one. And he threatens to pull Fennis from the movie if he feels it starts changing her.
Go figure—her father is a chemist (pharmacist, for those of us in the colonies) and a stern control freak. So, he’s basically the same father as the one in Pink String and Sealing Wax, which also starred…Sally Ann Howes. WTF?!?
Dir: Rodney Ackland
Starring Sally Ann Howes, Wilfrid Lawson, Kathleen O’Regan
Watched on Network UK blu-ray (region B)