Bank Holiday

John Lodge - Stephen Howard
Margaret Lockwood - Catherine Lawrence
Hugh Williams - Geoffrey
René Ray - Doreen Richards
Merle Tottenham - Milly
Linden Travers - Ann Howard
Wally Patch - Arthur
Kathleen Harrison - May
Garry Marsh - "Follies" manager
Jeanne Stuart - Miss Mayfair
Wilfrid Lawson - Police sergeant
Felix Aylmer - Surgeon
Michael Rennie - Guardsman

Carol Reed climbed a full level above the inconsequential work he had been doing earlier when he was hired to direct Bank Holiday for Gainsborough. It was, by design, a fairly ambitious project in that it mixed several modes - comedy, sentimentality and naturalism. The story (by Rodney Ackland and Hans Wilhelm) was original, and, as was usually the case when Reed did a film, written directly for the screen; the script (by Ackland and Roger Burford) was inferior. The source of the film is unquestionably Grand Hotel and indeed the principal hotel at the resort is called 'the Grand'.

The core of the film is a weepy, three-handkerchief tale of bereavement, temporarily thwarted love and near suicide. Far more interesting, however, is the array of smaller stories with which Reed adorns and enlivens his plot, which is set at a seaside resort over a long holiday weekend in August. The lugubrious foundation of the movie requires that Catherine (Margaret Lockwood), a nurse, become deeply attached to Stephen (John Lodge), a handsome, kindly and unspeakably dull gentleman whose wife dies in childbirth just as Catherine is about to set off on a bank holiday with her boyfriend Geoffrey (Hugh Williams). The remainder of the film records Catherine's growing realisation that she loves Stephen and her fearful intimations that he may attempt suicide before she returns to London (he does). Fortunately, this weepy woman's magazine narrative is relieved by a number of sprightly vignettes of different holidaymakers who surround Catherine and Geoffrey over the weekend.

The people we meet in Bank Holiday are almost all working class and Reed uses the opportunity to cultivate his eye for social nuances. Among them are Arthur and May (Wally Patch and Kathleen Harrison), a Cockney couple with a large, squalling family. Also Doreen (Renee Rey) and Milly (Merle Tottenham), two unsophisticated young shop girls, one of whom - Doreen - has entered a beauty contest; 'Miss Mayfair' (Jeanne Stuart), the favoured contender in the beauty contest. In contrast to the love story in Bank Holiday, these characters are rendered in brisk sketches that consist of closely observed social notation. Arthur and May are treated as objects of amusement. In what seems to be the tradition of poor people everywhere, the Cockneys' impecuniousness has not retarded their childbearing impulses and they have kids at their heels constantly, usually crying for things like 'sugar pops'. One parent or the other is always lugging a baby and a child's toy. Overall, the atmosphere emanating from the Cockneys is one of tremendous encumbrance.

Although the Cockney family is the most extreme example of how tightly people's lives can be laced up by poverty, virtually everyone else in the movie leads a pinched existence as well. The characters in Bank Holiday are mostly cardboard cut-outs, but here and there one encounters an extra psychological layer of the sort that was to distinguish Reed's later work. Doreen, the aspiring 'Miss England' contestant, is satirised as vulgar and superficial, a cut-rate beauty that ironically has just been jilted by her fiancé. But when Catherine similarly rejects Geoff and the contrivances of the screenplay throw Doreen and Geoff together, Reed allows her a sobbing, drunken speech in which the depth of her grief emerges, altering our perception of her. Geoff is also depicted with surprising acuteness and psychological realism; a steady accretion of specifies about his deficiency of character and intelligence - most of them quite credible and unforced - make it easy for us to accept Catherine's decision to break off with him. At the station, his sexual aggression towards Catherine, while not really exaggerated is unseemly, and he is selfish towards the other people who want to ride in his coach.

At the resort, we learn that he has foolishly not booked in advance, that he is overly concerned with appearances and that he is just a shade or so too lecherous towards Catherine, even allowing for her decision as a 'modern woman' to engage in premarital sex. There is little in the slow unfolding of Geoff's character that is unusually imaginative, but its very gradualism, and the attention paid to detail, are a credit to the solidity of Reed's artistic instincts at this early phase in his career. The film's denouement alternates between the cheerfully lightweight and the grossly sentimental. Back in London, Catherine saves Stephen from a suicide attempt that he has undertaken after reading too much Keats. Meanwhile, Reed delivers facile but amusing shots, as the 'holiday trippers' alight at the train station: the dowdy cockney wife strikes back at her overbearing husband; 'Miss Mayfair', winner of the contest, steps off the train with the judge; and so forth.

In addition to its other assets, Bank Holiday demonstrates Reed's continuing mastery of cinematic language, even where his script was inferior. The witty opening shots summarise the ant colony aspect of London's working world with admirably spare strokes. Workers of every type and description are seen toiling away fiercely until the sound of Big Ben at noon liberates them for the rest of the day. The stampede to Victoria Station is dramatised as efficiently as one could imagine. In these early scenes, and later at the resort, the vagaries of the weather buffet the holidaymakers; a comedy summarised for us crisply through sharp cuts from newspaper headlines to sheets of rain and people scurrying this way and that. These sequences have far more vitality and sureness of touch than one would expect from a young British director working on his sixth movie. Reed already had his own creative ideas, which he would refine and amplify in future films.