B-movie director Francis Searle went to Dublin to shoot this, the fifth of seven short films that ended his career, all of them of middling to poor quality. These films are quite unclassifiable for the most part, because their plots are invariably unsatisfying and they don't really have a genre of such other than in their depiction of a slice-of-life late '60s realism.
THE PALE FACED GIRL is a particularly poor effort that suffers from a lack of decent characterisation and some unintentionally unpleasant creations. Writer Lee Dunne never amounted to much, having only written the odd episode of CALLAN and forgotten Sid James TV show TAXI! The story is about a group of lads who go out on the pull on a Saturday night and in particular the meeting between one of their number, Mick, and Cecelia, who he has his eye on.
The narrative follows the pair through a handful of mildly embarrassing situations where it soon becomes apparent that Mick is a rather disturbed creation prone to self-reflective narrative that the viewer is forced to listen in on thanks to some voice-over work. He's presented as a romantic loner but comes across as more of a serial killer type. Fidelma Murphy is pretty as the object of his affections, but this all seems to be played for some non-existent laughs, which are so tame that I didn't even recognise them.
