I never expected to be able to see The Girl Who Couldn't Quite (1950).

For years I didn't even know that it could be seen without recourse to a time machine. Recounting its origins in Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941–1945 (1998), Leo Marks was so more than ordinarily deprecating about the merits of his first stage effort that even a critical reader could be forgiven for taking his word that it was summarily consigned from its 1947 West End premiere to the ephemeral mercies of repertory and amateur dramatics. I've never heard of a production since I became aware of it. In fourteen years, I couldn't even get my hands on the script. Perhaps the memory hole of its fortunes allowed its author to feel comfortable giving away, as part of his briefing of Noor Inayat Khan, the gimmick of its plot:

'A girl who can't laugh . . . She hasn't laughed since she was five, and she's now eighteen. Her parents have taken her to every doctor, psychiatrist and comedian in the country but she still can't laugh. Then one day she looks out of the window and sees a dirty old tramp, and bursts out laughing. They bring him into the house and she finds him even funnier. They persuade him to stay, but the one thing he won't stand for is being laughed at.

'However, he's no ordinary tramp, and he's determined to find out what stopped her from laughing. And when he discovers what someone did to her she's cured. And that's when she sees him as he really is – a dirty old tramp. And he has to leave her.'

'It's very sad. And very funny. I suppose he leaves without letting her know how much she owes to him?'

What Sufi instinct told her that?

'He doesn't think she owes him anything.'

'Does it have a title?'

It hadn't until then. But her expression supplied it. 'It's called The Girl Who Couldn't Quite!'

What Marks withholds from the reader with this poignantly personal scene of two writers meeting across a table of key-phrases and security checks is the other permanent record of his play—in 1948, after a longer professional half-life than its author would admit to, it was optioned and produced for the screen by John Argyle. I don't know its box office figures, but it got a favorable two stars on release from Picturegoer, played North America on network TV, by some digitally circuitous route found its way to the crackly free channel where I watched it like a shot. Whatever its infelicities of authorship or infidelities of adaptation, I regret to inform a codemaker almost a quarter-century dead that it's as recognizable as his work as if he'd encrypted it using "The Life That I Have." Secrets and damage, the patterns of people, being funny about things that aren't: that's the indicator group of a transmission from Leo Marks.

As promised, the core of the story is funny and sad and strange, a bittersweet psychoanalytic variation on ATU 559. Making her much braced against entrance, Elizabeth Henson's Ruth Taylor is a princess only in the sheltered upper-class sense, but her imperious caprices are straight out of fairy tale, she'd kill her suitors with riddles if she had them. Instead she treats her household with the inscrutable cruelty of a changeling, or perhaps only a deeply hurt child who has been treated for far too long as too fragile to punish or even remonstrate with in anything but the most placatory of tones. In the body of a grown girl, she holds herself as stiffly as a tantrum about to explode, her deep-set eyes as mad as a hawk's. "It isn't there," she announces, staring out over the manicured slope of the garden with its roses and terraced steps down to the fishpond. Asked what isn't, she answers with the same bitter finality, "Everything." After three minutes in her company, which is all she needs to bait and bruise her mother and grandmother and the two gentlemen who have for business and personal reasons come to call, it correctly startles the audience as much as her family to see her suddenly laughing, the disdainful stone of her face unselfconsciously alive. There's no malice in it, either, only a kind of quizzical discovery as encouraging to her mother as the sound itself. "Laugh? Is that what I did?" Hence the immediate mobilization to find the cause of her merriment, when nothing in thirteen years has cracked so much as a smile; fortunately she's made a sketch of it, the handsome stranger glimpsed on the grounds whom she describes to her mother as passionately as if she'd seen him in the movies, or a toyshop window. "He's the nicest face I've ever seen. Nicer than Mr. Pelham's. Nicer than Mr. Evans'. Nicer than anybody!" After such a distinguished build-up, what else could the laws of comedy and folklore produce but the jauntily road-worn and pugnaciously self-sufficient figure of Bill Owen's Tim, brashing through the well-bred anxieties of the drawing room like a beer cocktail in a battered hat, all sal volatile and short-stack swagger as he announces himself, "Now then, who wants me? And what's the bleeding game?"

The game, it will turn out, is a test of his own philosophy: "When I say charity, I don't mean, 'I've got a sixpence I don't want. You can have it.' I mean, 'I've got a sixpence I do want. You can still have it.'" On his introduction to the Taylor household, Tim dispensed airily with his last copper as a dig at the tight-fisted rich and made no apologies for his state, but he bristles with understandable dismay when the coin he's asked to part with is his dignity. In fact it's the sore spot in a generally irrepressible character, just the misapprehension of mockery enough to chase him from the house before Ruth's mother can even broach the bargain she hopes to strike for her daughter's health of mind. "There's two things in life I can't abide," he warns her when she catches him at the top of the garden, eye to eye only because he's standing two steps up: a torn pocket, a road-knotted neckerchief, his eyes warier than his blunt, brave words. "One's kippers and the other one's being laughed at . . . It makes me feel half my size. You can imagine how small that is." To Ruth, however, he possesses the stature of a hero, she hangs on his every word with an attention that disconcerts him as much as her mirth, this half-childish conundrum at once glacial and feral, breaking out in a rill of laughter one inappropriate minute, solemnly producing a sketch from the top of her stocking the next. Conscientiously, she stops herself from laughing when she sees its effect on Tim, the unprecedented consideration underlined by her direct confession, "I don't like a lot of people—not really like—not the way I like you." So he stays, wryly amused at his own responsibility, driving the bargain with Ruth herself. I remain the negative target audience for comedy spanking, but at least it is deployed exactly once to indicate the first time in her adolescent life that anyone has refused to indulge her whims and tempers, and critically as a consequence of the deliberate, show-offy rudeness she inflicted on her mother's guests in front of Tim. Much less in danger of playing like knock-off shrew-taming and much sweeter and twistier in light of the personalities involved is the relationship that evolves between them once he's taught her, by way of amends for the spanking, the refrain which is the only work-safe part of his filk of "Molly Malone." For Ruth, Tim is willing to take a spill down a hillside in good clothes, strike a classical attitude with a tea cozy and a fistful of biscuits, reel in the immemorial boot from an afternoon's fishing like any comedian, but the film takes equal and less slapstick note of just how much of their friendship is merely him treating her like a normal person, catching her up on the fundamentals of human manners and emotions and idiom as if it weren't at all strange for a somber, literal-minded eighteen-year-old to need an explanation of sharing like an eight-year-old or younger. He has a quirky, boyish look himself, those joker's brows visible from the cheap seats. In the admiring studies that Ruth draws of him until she can paper a portfolio with his face, he's downright sophisticated, a "smasher," but they don't make such an odd couple when they stroll down the streets of the village for real. It has overtones; others notice. Ruth's mother makes no comment, but the grandmother who has never approved of fostering an unregenerate vagabond makes sure to drop the bombshell where she can confront him with it: "Did you know Ruth is in love with him?" Of course she is, her wise fool, her imaginary prince. He's the talisman she carries against an encounter with fog, of which she has an unspeakable, childlike dread. But whatever Tim feels for her in turn—and it is more than obligation or pity, a shy, almost self-guarded flicker through his usual brass—it can't be as simple as ever after. The more obediently she follows his lead, the more seriously he takes his position as the person who is teaching her to be human, which inevitably, fatefully means the person who starts to wonder what stopped her the first time around.

Without a playscript to compare to, I can't tell if the original stage version gave a better idea of the process by which Tim comes to suspect that her emotional arrest is more than the arbitrary eccentricity of a girl who has been deemed "ill—mentally," but when the time comes to twitch back the curtain on Ruth's trauma, it's a brakes-off exorcism that sufficiently prefigures Peeping Tom (1960) that despite their diametrically different outcomes, The Girl Who Couldn't Quite feels more than a little like a trial piece of its famous, rigorously implicating study of a child in whom fear has been cinematically instilled. It's not just the psychoanalytics of the scene, the darkened church where Tim talks Ruth through recovering the secret she was supposed to keep forever of the face that haunts the fog, the same face every time of the nurse who was so sticky-sweet where adults could see and so poisonous when left alone with a child, a narrative of abuse that skirts far closer to the directly sexual than even Ruth's frozen rages telegraphed. "She used to like—changing. And I had to stand and watch her. And on her neck where no one could see it but me, there was a scar . . . And if ever I told Granny or Mummy about Thursday afternoons, she'd make the scar grow on me . . . Her cousin used to come. Not always the same cousin. And it was always very secret. And if ever I told Granny or Mummy, she said she'd make me hold her neck with my finger and make the scar grow on me." It's the fog itself, the last-ditch trigger to which Tim unbars the door as if unbolting memories, coiling through the pews to thicken the same shaft of light as cigarette smoke in a cinema, distorting onto the wall a blurred shadow that sharpens suddenly into the hateful face of the nurse, not even the mercifully still image of a lantern slide, but twenty-four horrors a second playing on a screen of stones, scowling, witchlike, one hand ready at her collar to uncover the dreadful scar. If it came from the stage production, it's a use of media in theater I hadn't realized was current in the 1940's. If it was invented for the film, it's a stroke of hauntological genius, Ruth projected right back to her childhood rather as another deep-eyed, red-haired girl, in the decade to come, will dream of a magic camera that can scry the children inside the adults it photographs. You even get your voyeurism which Marks claimed the discipline of cryptography was inseparable from, decoding not merely the transpositions of letters and numbers but the insides of other people's heads. It's such a coup de théâtre that I can't really care that its psychological explanation might as well be a bad fairy's spell, the defiantly derisive child-Ruth reduced to desperate promises that she didn't mean to laugh, she won't laugh anymore, she'll never laugh again—by the same token, a shock reaction of amnesia makes little sense realistically, but it functions like the breaking of the spell, a thirteen-year fugue state she's just now waking from, which is how the other sixpence drops.

It's done with neat symmetry, which doesn't help it hurt less. "Makes me feel what I am," Tim explained about laughter, back at the start of his tenure in the house when the only thing anyone in it knew about him was that he made its daughter happy. "That I'm just not worth being thought about." Now as he prepares to leave, he acknowledges that same shriveling sense of exposure with the wry, consenting, "It's all right, Mrs. Lady. You don't have to bribe me to go, or break it gentle. You just say, 'Ruth sees you now for what you are.' I'll understand." The irony, of course, is that Ruth doesn't see him at all, not her inseparable, courageous friend who let himself be whatever she needed, analyst or clown. The enchantment is gone that made him a prince in her eyes, but so is all memory of their time together except for an eerie cold overcast of knowledge she's not yet ready to face consciously again, chilling her whenever she looks at him where once she felt delight. She doesn't recognize him from her own drawing. She doesn't remember how his arms tightened briefly, certainly around her, promising what she had begged him, "No, Ruth, I won't never leave you. Never." She turns out to see him off, very properly and unfamiliarly, and when their conversation strays onto the dangerous ground of charity which they discussed so often, in keeping with his determination not to disturb her still-settling equilibrium he deflects her déjà vu about sixpence onto her father, who has heretofore hardly existed in the picture except as one of those framed photographs on the sideboard her mother kisses each time she returns from business in London. Now Ruth is curious about him, about his charity work which her mother has administered since his death, about his books which for the first time she picks up to read from. Tim was never linked romantically with her mother, but he has been ghost-parenting her in his way, as much as he ghost-partnered her. Perhaps it's for this reason that she no longer sees him as her attractively idealized smasher, having matured enough to parse her father-figures from her objects of desire—I cannot overstate the substrate of Freud in this screenplay as well as Leo Marks generally, although the casting of a Tim with a genuinely nice face ensures that even if it was transference, it wasn't grotesque. The audience sees him true and he is not diminished. Even the film doesn't like to let go of him, almost ending in an infuriating blaze of self-sacrifice before catching itself to suggest that Ruth's memories may yet return and her treasuring of Tim with them. "I know now . . . that I'm in your debt . . . One day, perhaps I'll know why, and then I'll know how to thank you. But until I do, I want you to remember one thing . . . I'll never let you down. I promise you, Tim. I'll never let you down." He would have stayed forever if that was what she needed from him: "I'll be anything—I'll be the odd-job man, do anything as long as I can be near you all—and keep an eye on her." Off through the garden he goes in his old hat and coat, her first sketch of him like a memory in his pocket, whistling his unprintable leitmotif.

The pothole in the path of auteur theory is that Leo Marks did not write the screen version of The Girl Who Couldn't Quite. He got credit for the source material of the stage play, but the screenplay itself is co-credited to Marjorie Deans and director Norman Lee and therefore I do not know who to blame for its problems. Its central relationship is weird and tender and carnivalesque and far more convincing than its tendency toward the whack-a-ding-Freud deserves and the film which contains it is jerky and mistimed and distracted with extraneous business and its principals don't meet until the end of an intrusively jokey, once again largely unnecessary first act. Some of its detours are not deadly, as when an introductory lesson in charity leads to a fête where Ruth has arranged to disburse quite a number of her household's goods without particularly warning her household first. "Oh, but anyone can give what's theirs! It's much more fun giving other people's." The sequence in which the respectable lawyer and doctor who orbit the Taylor household get fortuitously mistaken for a pair of escaped lunatics while dressed down as tramps, however, doesn't even compensate the audience with free rissoles. "Granny, they're better with salt!" Betty Stockfeld and Iris Hoey rhyme nicely as Pamela and Janet Taylor—the mother as slyly surprising an ally for Tim as the grandmother maintains a sniffy opposition—but Stuart Lindsell and Vernon Kelso as the aforementioned John Pelham and Paul Evans belong to some other comedy of manners entirely, one for starters in which it matters that John is courting Pam, who at least disposes quickly of the lead weight of the title drop. Ruth's damage is heavier than any other element of the plot and the only reason the film doesn't buckle underneath it is Owen and Henson meeting it head-on, unapologetically and without schmaltz even when the score by Ronald Binge is doing its best to the contrary. On the sliding scale of second features, it's a terrifically mixed bag and I want some idea of which divers hands mixed up what. The layer of adaptation makes me even more cautious than usual of looking for the author in the text, but Marks put himself so shallowly beneath the surface of Cloudburst (1951), I don't see how a viewer can be expected not to wonder how much of wisecracking, thin-skinned Tim is projected from the Marks without a brother who always got the joke in on himself before anyone else could. "Well, what kippers do is strictly personal." He was even more willing to talk about the breadcrumbs of himself he left in the traumatized, murderous voyeur of Mark Lewis, so perhaps he should be identified as well with fractured Ruth, the one who has to be puzzled out as well as the one who does the puzzling. "I don't like this kind of trust." Cryptography, psychology, storytelling, what he dealt in was pattern recognition and it makes it difficult not to approach his work as its own text for decryption. Since Tennyson's "Be near me when my light is low" recurs in Between Silk and Cyanide as both poem-code and prayer, I am inclined to assume against a total gut renovation on the part of the screenwriters when I encounter an emotionally significant reading of the same verses in The Girl Who Couldn't Quite. For all the details he kept to himself in his cagily charming memoirs and interviews, Freud always said the unconscious never lied and Leo Marks seems to have left quite a lot of his lying around onscreen.

As a recommendation, I am afraid the film plumbs new depths of uselessness in that I found it on the former TVTime, i.e. the Roku free channel which I really suspect of ripping off the catalogue of Talking Pictures, and it seems available legitimately in no other form beyond a Region 2 DVD which is currently out of print. BBC Genome claims that recorded excerpts of the original production were broadcast during its run in 1947 and I would naturally like to hear them, but no apparent dice. For such purposes must one hope that the Internet Archive has not actually nuked itself from orbit so that one day it can host a copy with decent resolution. The cinematography by Geoffrey Faithfull seems mostly matter-of-fact, but he had lensed the first couple of years of Michael Powell's quota quickies and the fog scene would be worth seeing without extra static. Just because Leo Marks had figured out how to blend gut-punches and comedy by the time of Between Silk and Cyanide doesn't mean he knew it first thing out of SOE, but in the fall of 2010, reading the brick-thick paperback on which I had pounced at sight that afternoon at the Ambleside Book Barn in Vancouver, I had no inkling of his awkward and signature screen debut and while I can see a lot in it that doesn't gel, I appreciate beyond words that it got filmed. It's not on the same level, but it's not an insult to the other inheritor of its title, the memory of Noor Inayat Khan: "But to me she was, and would always remain, the Girl Who Couldn't Quite." This sixpence brought to you by my smashing backers at Patreon.