John Guillermin (1954)
The screening was introduced by a BFI curator called Vic Pratt. There was a full house and Pratt thought it was great to see so many ‘fans of British films’. It’s a weird kind of patriotism that manifests itself in turning up at NFT3 but watching The Crowded Day is an excavation of British film-making and social life from (just) before I was born, and I enjoy this kind of archaeology. The film dramatises the life of a West End store and the people who work there, during the course of one Christmas Eve. (There’s an agreeable symmetry to the beginning and end, with a watchman trudging in to turn on the lights and trudging back to put them out. It helps that the watchman is Sid James.) The store is very obviously modelled on a real one: we see the actual sign for Bourne and Hollingsworth before the camera moves downward to introduce the shop as Bunting and Hobbs.
There’s a rich variety of familiar faces in The Crowded Day. Many of them were well-known character actors when the film was made. A few of these are no longer famous (Freda Jackson, Cyril Raymond, Marianne Stone). A greater number enjoyed continued success in British pictures or on television for years or decades to come (Dora Bryan, Edward Chapman, Dandy Nichols, Joan Hickson, Thora Hird, Sid James, Sydney Tafler, Richard Wattis). (I was also interested by the presence of three elderly actors whom I first saw when they were even more elderly in The Forsyte Saga – Nora Nicholson, Kynaston Reeves and George Woodbridge.) What’s striking too is that the relative newcomers with obvious talent went on to bigger and better things in television (Prunella Scales) or cinema (Rachel Roberts, who’s terrifically vivid here – she fills and lights up the screen every time she appears). The weaker performers – Vera Day, Josephine Griffin, Sonia Holm, Patricia Marmont, Patricia Plunkett, Joan Rice – didn’t. (Day and Marmont were both at the NFT3 screening and Day did an interview beforehand with Vic Pratt. She wasn’t well prepared but she was lively and her voice carried well enough not to need to rely on the mikes that hardly anyone at BFI seems able to get to grips with.)
I don’t know which of the B&H shopgirls were from the Rank stable but, apart from Rachel Roberts and Vera Day, they mostly have those trademark accents, nearly posh English but edged with the odd American note – as if to signal the (faint) possibility of their making it across the Atlantic and in Hollywood. One or two of them are facially as well as vocally pale imitations of real stars (Joan Rice occasionally suggests Ava Gardner). The standout in the cast in more ways than one is John Gregson, who made The Crowded Day the year after his best-known film, Genevieve. Gregson’s a genuinely skilful and likeable actor, capable of an effortless variety of mood, unthreatening without being weak. Here he’s playing a young white-collar worker who’s a bit useless but supposed to be hard to resist and, thanks to Gregson’s charm, actually is. (He’s typecast, however, to an alarming degree: because of the success of Genevieve the character Gregson plays here also has a passion for vintage cars whom he addresses as quasi-girlfriends.)
In his introduction, Vic Pratt explained that The Crowded Day was predicted to be a box-office success but turned out not to be. You can understand why. The human tapestry aspect of the film naturally allows for a mix of serious and light-hearted elements but it lurches so violently from one extreme to the other that filmgoers of the time must have struggled to get their bearings. The effect of these shifts of tone is often ridiculous but occasionally startling too. When she tells them she won’t be going to the staff Christmas party, the other girls assume that the super-sophisticated Eve Patricia Marmont) has better things to do socially. Instead, she returns to her flat and we’re introduced to her war-wounded, wheelchair-bound husband: the transition and revelation are clumsy but when the husband (Michael Goodliffe) quietly expresses how badly he feels about Eve spending all her evenings cooped up with him, the moment has an emotional rawness and reality that takes you by surprise. Then there’s Yvonne (Josephine Griffin), deserted by her boyfriend and given notice by the store when she reveals she’s expecting his baby. Her frantic dash through pitch black London streets has an urgency and starkness that comes out of nowhere. (The technical aplomb of a sequence like this is offset by comically inept details like the voices supplied to two budgies in a cage – they sound like macaws with loud-hailers.)
The Crowded Day is a bizarre confection. I completely misunderstood a sequence in which Yvonne comes upon a litter bin and looks at it significantly. I thought the bit of paper her disappeared fiancé had left for her with a bitchy girl on the perfume counter (the message telling Yvonne that he’s back, has got a job, wants to marry her) was going to fly out of the bin in the December wind and deliver a happy ending. (This would have put to shame the East Enders convention of disposing of secret information in a kitchen pedal bin where it’s bound to be discovered.) Instead, Yvonne merely thinks better of suicide and chucks into the bin the strychnine tablets she swiped from the store pharmacy earlier. The film is unpleasant in taking it out, for comic and dramatic effect, on physically unprepossessing individuals (the boss’s plain Jane daughter, the seedy man who pursues Yvonne on her nocturnal wanderings). The shop floor comedy (especially Richard Wattis in an unfunny routine with a mannequin whose outfit and wig he keeps having to change) now seems like timid Are You Being Served? The Crowded Day also has foreshadowings of the Carry On films – and not just in the presence of Sid James and the bosomy, giggly Vera Day (like a girl doing a screen test for a part that went to Barbara Windsor) and the writing credit for Talbot Rothwell. The score by Edwin Astley often sounds to be shaping up for a Carry On punchline too.
As the climax to Yvonne’s story illustrates, the film doesn’t make that much of the Christmas setting – certainly not in neatly resolving the situations of the characters in a seasonally traditional way (though it’s true that Yvonne starts to buck up after taking refuge in a church). The Crowded Day does, though, reveal bits of vanished social history in a way that’s great to watch now – because the film apparently wasn’t designed to be socially revelatory. You get a sense of London only a few years after the end of World War II, a few months after the end of some forms of rationing. The conventions of the shop – the battles over commission, a shopwalker modelling a bridal gown – are fascinating. (So is the fact that the shopgirls live in the same hostel.) The bride-to-be’s mother (Thora Hird) is hopelessly old-fashioned: she favours satin for the dress. Her up-to-the-minute daughter (Prunella Scales) wants nylon instead. (Thora Hird is wonderful during the pitch from the bossy saleswoman played by Freda Jackson: Hird doesn’t seem to be listening that carefully, she just enjoys the sitting down and being treated as a valued customer.) When one of the girls comes to the Christmas do with a mystery man, her colleagues are surprised that she’s landed such a beau. It turns out he’s from an escort agency: I don’t know whether it’s because a girl’s getting a boy from one of those was morally beyond the pale in 1954 or simply to preserve the mystery that we don’t see his face properly, but the concealment works. (The escort is played by Arthur Hill, who went on to work regularly on American television.)
7 December 2010
