Young Man’s Fancy – 1939 | 77 mins | Comedy, Romance | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Robert Stevenson‘s gentle romantic comedy, A Young Man’s Fancy (1939) is set in 1870. The young lovers visit Paris and are trapped there by the advance of the Prussian army. But the topical anti-German associations have small weight beside the conflict of generations in London. Aristocracy, recapitulating centuries of British history, plans a merger with business wealth: the heroes parents give a party to announce his engagement to the daughter of a brewer. But the young aristocrat rebels and falls in love with a young performer while at a circus show, together the aristocrat and working-class girl run off to Paris for adventures, but return: it seems that parental choice will prevail after all. It comes down in the end to the aristocrat himself. Braving his wife’s rage, he turns the son away from the church door and back to his true love.

Though this film also has its staged and conventional aspects, it is admirably sharp where it matters, in its analysis of class and family conflicts. At the end of their time in Paris, the lovers wonder how they will survive a return to the realities of home. While he insists I’ll never change my mind, she recalls the details of the life they have shared, which will come to seem so far away; Oh, let’s enjoy this minute before it goes. It’s slipping away so fast. It’s behind us already, it’s gone, it’s gone…

Far from pulling the film out of shape, the romanticism of A Young Man’s Fancy gives the class analysis its dynamism. It is a quality which Ealing will not recapture. Indeed, losing it seems a natural part of the process of maturing into the solid, reliable, Ealing which we know and love, or detest, or both. A Young Man’s Fancy, is habitually damped down into a more muted and resigned sense of loss: the romantic mode of Brief Encounter.

Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing, Charles Barr: Ealing Studios.