I've never read a Catherine Cookson novel I've no doubt they are very good. This was based on one, Rooney another.
British movies of the 1950s were normally good with kids. Not this one. She's a charmless kid who likes to brag about her deadbeat father. I think we're meant to warm to him even though he works at the dock yards with vertigo, endangering others.
Dad is John Gregson, who is an affable presence. Gregson felt it needed someone like Victor McLaglen and he was right. This should be a "hulking ape humanised by his daughter" story so work. They should have motivated his drinking more and killed off his wife (bland Kathleen Ryan) and other child (Richard O'Sullivan) so that it was just him and his kid against the world. That would've given us some sympathy for him.
As it is, he drinks despite having a wife and two kids, he endangers people at his work by hiding his vertigo, he gets possessively jealous over a guy who likes his wife... I'm all with his mother in law. If you had mother in law trying to take the kid off him when the wife is dead - it would've been more primeval.
The kid sings at the church at the end, and it hit me this is the same plot as a Shirley Temple film, with Jacqueline melting the heart of a crusty old manager. But as depicted here, the dad is a drunk - he's just going to keep drinking.
There's also a subplot which could've been cut out - a romance between Maureen Swanson and Tony Wright. I'm not sure what the parents' concern is - is one Protestant and the other Catholic? That would've made more sense.
Rank really didn't know how to make commercial films in the Hollywood mode.
Nicely shot. And some good Irish actors like Cyril Cusack.
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