Young Man's Fancy (film)

Young Man's Fancy
Directed byRobert Stevenson
Written by
Produced byS.C. Balcon
Starring
CinematographyRonald Neame
Edited by
Music byErnest Irving
Production
company
Distributed byABFD
Release date
  • 1 August 1939 (1939-08-01)
Running time
77 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

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]