There Was a Young Lady
1953 film by Lawrence Huntington

There Was a Young Lady is a 1953 British second feature ('B') comedy film directed by Lawrence Huntington and starring Michael Denison, Dulcie Gray and Sydney Tafler. It was written by Vernon Harris, Huntington and John Jowett. The film marked the screen debut of Geraldine McEwan.
Plot
Very efficient secretary Elizabeth Foster effectively runs a diamond merchant firm. Her boss David Walsh (who inherited the firm from his uncle, but knows nothing about diamonds) buys a diamond ring from a street vendor, planning to propose to her, but she tells him the diamond is actually paste, and far from worth the £25 he paid. His embarrassment over this causes him to forgo proposing. She tells him of her plan to rescue the firm from its dire financial position, by purchasing the family jewels of a duke David went to school with for £70,000, though they only have to pay £7000 on account; she has a prospective buyer already, who may be willing to pay £90,000. However, David is unwilling to go along with how she intends to raise the sum (which includes mortgaging his willing mother's house), so she quits.
She walks out of her office and straight into the midst of a smash and grab robbery. Accidentally blocking the back door of the gang's getaway car, she is forced to get inside by Joe and driven away.
The public source identifies “There Was a Young Lady” as 1953 film by Lawrence Huntington. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around There, Young and Lady.
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This entry incorporates text from “There Was a Young Lady” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.