Bank Holiday
Carol Reed (1938)
The BFI programme note comprised an extract from a 2005 study of Carol Reed by Peter William Evans. At the start of this extract, Evans describes Bank Holiday as ‘remarkable for its uncompromising attitude even in sexual matters towards female self-determination’ and quotes a description of the main character, a young nurse called Catherine, by another writer on film, Bruce Babington. Catherine is, according to Babington, a woman ‘moving between two men, one of them prosaically embodying her own class restrictions, the other higher-classed and romantic’. Catherine is about to spend the August Bank Holiday weekend with her boyfriend, Geoffrey, in the fictional seaside resort of Bexborough. (Close to London, it could be Brighton or Southend; according to IMDB, the sea front sequences were shot in different towns although there’s no precise information about the filming locations.) Catherine’s thoughts are elsewhere – back in London, where she has just witnessed the death in childbirth of a young woman called Ann Howard and broken the news to Ann’s husband, Stephen: his reaction to his wife’s death is that he wants to see her body but not his newborn son. By the end of Bank Holiday, the relationship between Catherine and Geoffrey has ended; she has dashed back to London midway through the weekend, convinced that Stephen Howard is on the point of suicide. She is right. Stephen is saved in the nick of time. In the film’s final scene, he’s in a hospital bed, being cared for by Nurse Catherine. According to Peter William Evans:
‘Catherine, the maternally defined nurse, but as yet childless spinster, is enchanted by the fantasy of the caring father-figure painted by Stephen’s wife [whom Catherine has been nursing for some time]. The mature man … is the nurse’s object of desire; his dying wife, the mother of his child, becomes the screen on which is projected her own maternal fantasy. …’
Evans sees in the film’s lighting scheme, in particular a shot of Catherine in her ‘snowy white uniform’, ‘an ironic portrayal of the darker forces that illuminate her fantasy’. He refers to ‘Catherine’s pursuit of a lover who, in some senses, is … dead’. Appraising the film’s ending, Evans concludes that:
‘The fantasy of romantic love, the ‘holiday’, turns out … to be no more than a desire for convention and all the constraints that social heavens allow.’
John Oliver, the BFI curator who introduced the screening of Bank Holiday, commended it in much more straightforward terms – as a strong drama and a valuable slice of social history and ritual. It’s possible that Oliver was tailoring his remarks for the audience in NFT1 – this was a free-for-seniors matinee (packed out) – but his well-organised, perceptive introduction was much more in tune with the film that I saw than was Evans’s interpretation. The sexual themes are certainly, for the time, daring: Geoff and Catherine intend to book into the Grand Hotel at Bexborough as a married couple (as Geoff goes up an escalator from the underground to the mainline train station in London, he keeps seeing posters for a film called ‘Sinners’); and Peter William Evans does well to highlight a moment in Bank Holiday when Catherine ‘in a swimming pool scene resists the controlling gaze of her insipid partner Geoff by refusing to dive into the water to stimulate even further his visual pleasure’. (According to Wikipedia, the censor originally trimmed five minutes from Bank Holiday: it would be interesting exactly which five minutes.) But I don’t think either the screenplay – by Rodney Ackland (best known as the author of the play The Pink Room, which eventually became Absolute Hell), Roger Burford and Hans Wilhelm – or Carol Reed’s direction pins down the sexual-romantic implications of the story in the schematic way that Evans suggests. Bank Holiday is all the more absorbing because some of these implications are inchoate in what’s on screen.
It was natural for Reed and the writers to want to keep the timeframe neat, moving from the beginning to the end of the August Bank Holiday. Reed begins with an efficient, amusing montage of various types of worker downing tools, as midday strikes, presumably on the Saturday. (The placards outside a newsagent’s, forecasting the weekend weather and warning of ‘storm clouds of war over Europe’, seem, in long retrospect, a predictive reminder that the bank holiday ritual the film goes on to describe was presumably interrupted for several years not long after Bank Holiday‘s release, in June 1938.) Work doesn’t, of course, stop in the hospital where the chain-smoking Stephen Howard (John Lodge) waits anxiously outside a maternity ward; his wife Ann is about to have surgery to deliver her baby. At first, you think that Stephen, as he suggests in his opening conversation with Catherine (Margaret Lockwood), is just like any nervous father-to-be. There’s nothing in Catherine’s voice or face to suggest otherwise, when she talks either with Stephen or with Ann (Linden Travers) as she’s taken down to theatre. The mood changes instantly in a brief exchange between Catherine and the surgeon who’ll be operating on Ann. Catherine asks ‘what chance’ Ann has. ‘Very little, I’m afraid,’ replies the surgeon (Felix Aylmer), before adding, ‘The baby should be all right’. This is a startling suggestion that the loss of the mother, although somewhat regrettable, is of secondary importance to the survival of the child inside her. It’s difficult to tell, watching a British film of the late 1930s more than seventy years on, whether the matter-of- fact tone of the surgeon’s prediction reflects contemporary dramatic convention or that maternal mortality rates in childbirth were much higher at the time. I hadn’t known, until I googled the subject after seeing the film, that these mortality rates declined hardly at all during the first three decades of the twentieth century and were beginning to fall steeply only around the time that Bank Holiday appeared. Even so, it seems that the mortality rate in this country during the 1930s was around 4% (expressed as 40 in every 1000) so the emotionless prognosis still seems odd.
In any case, Ann Howard’s death in childbirth is a shocking event in Bank Holiday. It and Stephen Howard’s grief cast a long shadow over the entire film. Although the American John Lodge is a mechanical actor, he gives Stephen Howard a strange dignity; Lodge’s lack of meaningful facial expression in response to Ann’s death is effective because it chimes with the enormity of the catastrophe – looks as well as words fail Stephen. And Catherine’s inability to stop thinking about him during her time in Bexborough works very well. Margaret Lockwood expresses a convincing sense of distraction: neither her companion Geoffrey (Hugh Williams) nor the audience can be sure of what exactly she’s thinking or feeling. The steps leading up to Stephen’s attempted suicide and the attempt itself are conventionally melodramatic but they include some atmospheric moments: Stephen walking listlessly in the London rain; Catherine, on the beach at Bexborough in darkness, seeming telepathically to see Stephen standing on a London bridge and also looking into water. But Ann’s death really is too big a thing to happen as part of the film’s timeframe, when other elements of the story are treated realistically. (It might have been easier to accept if the death had occurred several weeks beforehand and Reed had shown, in flashbacks, how the bereaved husband had remained on Catherine’s mind.) Catherine’s closing words to Stephen in his hospital bed are jarring: when Stephen says to her, ‘You’ve come back’, she replies, ‘Everybody comes back. The holiday is over’. Since ‘everybody’ clearly doesn’t include Ann Howard and Catherine has no reason to think that Stephen isn’t still distraught at the loss of his wife, her words are bizarrely insensitive.
The writing, direction and playing of the scenes between Catherine and Geoffrey on their ill-fated weekend is excellent. What’s especially true is the way the pair keep trying to keep things going, to ignore the increasingly evident futility of their romance: she smiles to reassure him; he then tries to reinvigorate proceedings. As Geoffrey, Hugh Williams strikes a perfect balance between callow charm and fatuousness. The comedy elements in the Catherine-Geoffrey storyline – trying to book into the hotel as Mr and Mrs Smith, and so on – supply a bridge to the more explicitly comical characters and subplots, which involve a beauty pageant being held at the Grand, and a working-class Cockney couple, Arthur and May (Wally Patch and Kathleen Harrison), with their many kids in tow. Although these elements are overshadowed by what Catherine has left behind in London, Carol Reed manages them well. They’re underwritten, though. Doreen (Rene Ray), aka Miss Fulham, and her old-maid-in-waiting sidekick Milly (Merle Tottenham) drink cocktails to show the self-regarding vamp Miss Mayfair (Jeanne Stuart) how sophisticated they are but there’s no payoff to their downing Benedictine as if it was lemonade. Nor is there any explanation of how or why the put upon May suddenly stands up to her feckless pub crawler husband, although you’re glad that she does. Kathleen Harrison is vigorously amusing in the part; I particularly liked the way May rummages in a bag for the kids’ bathing costumes, which she then chucks in their direction.
The film attaches some importance to social distinctions and the seaside pleasures associated with these. There’s a funny scene in which a stage concert party performs their first show of the day to Arthur, an audience of one, who’s waiting for the pubs to open. I wasn’t sure, therefore, if there was any good reason why Arthur and May and their family are among those in the Grand on the Sunday evening. When Catherine gets a lift back to London with the Bexborough entertainments manager (Garry Marsh), who’s tried to make off with all the takings, their car is flagged down by the law en route. Wilfrid Lawson delivers a superb cameo as the police sergeant who interviews the pair: he asks questions of them with a weary calm, all the time determined to carry on eating his sandwich.
Footnote
Bank Holiday was preceded by a ten-minute documentary from 1964, Knees Up Mother Brown, made by Peter Smith, who introduced his film. It describes a Darby and Joan club in Stepney and focuses on four women in their seventies who enjoy going there. Although Smith clearly admires the club and means to celebrate those who attend it, the film is depressing. You expect working-class women of this period to look much older than their years and they do – but they look more unhealthy than ancient. There are clips from the club’s day trip to Southend. The women go to the Kursaal and the images are accompanied by their voices on the soundtrack, including a conversation about where one of them is going to be buried. The film ends suddenly and expressively: the human figures disappear from the screen, leaving the amusement park empty.
10 November 2014