Young Man's Fancy (film) explained

Young Man's Fancy
Director:Robert Stevenson
Producer:S.C. Balcon
Music:Ernest Irving
Cinematography:Ronald Neame
Studio:Ealing Studios
Distributor:ABFD
Runtime:77 minutes
Country:United Kingdom
Language:English

Young Man's Fancy is a 1939 British historical comedy film directed by Robert Stevenson and starring Anna Lee, Griffith Jones, and Seymour Hicks. The screenplay concerns an aristocratic Englishman who is unhappily engaged to a brewery heiress but meets Ada, an Irish human cannonball, during a visit to a music hall and falls in love with her. Together they are trapped in Paris during the Siege of Paris (1870-1871).

The screenplay was written by Roland Pertwee and Stevenson, with additional dialogue by Rodney Ackland and E.V.H. Emmett. The character of Ada, written especially for Anna Lee by Stevenson, her husband, is "based on Zazel, the original 'human cannon ball', who thrilled London audiences in the [eighteen] nineties by being shot from a cannon"[1] — however, "for the purposes of the film … the period [of the screenplay] has been put back to the seventies".[2]

See also

Notes and References

  1. http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/51591655 "Nursery Gossip", The Australian Women's Weekly, (Saturday, 28 January 1939), p.4
  2. http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/46380286 "Film World: Ana Lee Returns", The West Australian, (Thursday, 6 April 1939), p.3