Daily Archives: Sunday, June 12, 2016

  • The Crowded Day

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • The Crossing Guard

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sean Penn (1995)

    It’s clear from the start that the death of a child has occurred.  Legends on the screen introduce ‘The Father’ (Jack Nicholson) and ‘The Mother’ (Anjelica Huston).  She is attending a support group for the bereaved.  He is in the audience at an ‘exotic dancing’ club (striptease, pole-dancing).  Then we meet John Booth (David Morse), imprisoned for five years for manslaughter, the caption says.  We notice his scarred forehead and an immediate flashback shows him bashing his head against the bars of his cell to cause the damage that left the scars.   Sean Penn takes his time to reveal the details of the death which led Freddy and Mary Gale and Booth to their circumstances at the start of the film.  It transpires that Emily, the seven-year-old daughter of the Gales, was knocked down and killed, and that Booth was the drunk driver who caused her death.   The title of the picture refers to Freddy’s recurring nightmare of children, including Emily, being escorted across a road by a ‘crossing guard’ who is John Booth.  (It struck me as a pity that Americans don’t use the phrase ‘lollipop man’, which would have been more colourfully ambiguous.)  The story begins when Booth is released from prison – an event relished more by Freddy Gale, who runs a Los Angeles jewellery business, than by Booth himself, who is so mired in guilt that turning over a new leaf is inconceivable to him.  Freddy, on the other hand, has been waiting for Booth to be a free man again:  he’s determined to kill him.

    The Pledge is the only one of the five films Penn has so far directed – four full-length pictures and the segment for 11’ 09’ 01’ – which he hasn’t also written and it’s by some way the best of those I’ve seen (which don’t include his debut, The Indian Runner).  The Crossing Guard is a bad piece of writing in terms of both dialogue and dramatic structure.  The first exchange between Freddy and Mary, who’ve split up as a result of Emily’s death, is briefly promising.  He visits her, in their old house which she now shares with a new husband and her and Freddy’s young sons, to announce that Booth is out of jail.  He tells her she looks ‘wonderful’.  She replies with amused ruefulness:  ‘Wonderful would be pushing it a bit’.  Later in the conversation, when Mary tells Freddy that her and her husband’s business is going well, Freddy replies, ‘That’s wonderful’ – and you realise ‘wonderful’ is his watchword for the occasion, the means of being civil before he reminds Mary that he plans to kill Booth.

    But this is a rare moment of subtlety in the writing.  Penn is more often inclined to a flashy line that isn’t followed through (at a party Booth says, ‘I think freedom is overrated …’ and Penn cuts away before any of the guests can really probe the remark) or a clumsy feed (when Booth tells JoJo, an artist he meets at the same party and with whom he then has a brief relationship, how his forehead got scarred she says, ‘Because you couldn’t stand prison?’ just so that he can deliver the punchline, ‘No, because I couldn’t stand me’).  Booth describes Emily’s death to JoJo in a way that’s too objectively detailed (especially since he was drunk at the time – and there’s no indication that he was suddenly shocked into mental clarity).  As things get worse for him, Freddy spends more and more nights at the club.  The other men he drinks with in the audience there are presented merely as lustful slobs.  There’s not the faintest suggestion that any of them might have a backstory that explains their behaviour in the way his daughter’s death is supposed to account entirely for Freddy’s.

    In The Pledge, his third feature, Penn achieved something very unusual – he got an excellent performance from Jack Nicholson in a role which allowed him very few opportunities to be ‘up’.   Penn evidently learned a lot from directing Nicholson in The Crossing Guard because nearly everything about his acting here, as another essentially miserable character, feels wrong.   Whenever Freddy is gloomy, Nicholson is uncomfortable and unconvincing – he seems to be trying to suppress his natural vitality as a performer.    Whenever Freddy is able to let rip, the actor’s relief is palpable and he’s mostly over the top.  In the scene in which Freddy visits Mary to tell her the ‘good news’ that Booth’s been released, it would express his lethal obsession much more effectively if he really did appear to regard this as good news:  Nicholson seems miles away from getting on the character’s wavelength at this point.  There are a couple of moments of emotional breakdown where he can push himself and which are undeniably strong (particularly a panicked mid-night phone call to Mary).  Sequences in which Freddy is shown simply walking in a busy street work well because Nicholson is able to suggest just another LA commuter and to fascinate you because he’s Jack Nicholson.

    All in all, though, the director’s attitude towards his star here seems too uncritically admiring.  Penn doesn’t do enough to control Nicholson.  John Booth is so stupefied by his guilt that, when Freddy first breaks into the trailer where Booth is living outside his parents’ house and threatens to shoot him, Booth is completely calm.  He simply asks Freddy to give him a three-day reprieve – enough time for Booth to confirm to himself that life isn’t worth living.  David Morse plays the part with consistency and integrity – but the portrait feels preconceived:   Booth is locked into his remorse to the extent that he can’t even express it.   (As Sally said, you can’t help wondering too if Penn encouraged Morse to do the character this way in order not to get in Nicholson’s way centre stage.)

    Anjelica Huston manages to be both witty and affecting as Mary but it’s a poor role – her lines are nearly uninterrupted cliché – and an example of the variously insulting treatment of women in the film.  Piper Laurie, although she makes her usual strong impression, has virtually nothing to do as Booth’s mother.   Robin Wright is lovely as the nobly sympathetic JoJo but Penn shoots Wright so adoringly (the couple already had a child at the time and married in 1996) that it’s irritating – especially given how he presents the girls at the club.  The one exception there is a prostitute called Mia (Kari Wuhrer), who cares about but is rejected by Freddy:  she’s treated in the condescending and sentimental way that’s standard for a tart-with-a-heart character.    Neither JoJo nor Mia can get through to the men that matter to them because Freddy and Booth are monomaniacs.  This might seem like nothing more than uninspired rhyming in the screenplay but I think it also hints at something larger that I find offputting about Sean Penn’s sensibility as a film-maker.   He has a penchant for romanticising extreme male experience and for implying that the strength of the obsessions of the men concerned makes it impossible for the women in their lives to reach them.  Penn seems to assume that suffering guarantees depth.  He achieves that in The Pledge but The Crossing Guard, like Into the Wild, comes across as wallowing in the shallows.   (He also seems to be drawn to stories involving the killing of a child.  That’s also the subject of The Pledge.  In Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, Penn plays a vengeful father whose daughter has been murdered.)

    The parallel and converging stories of Freddy and Booth are schematic:  you know the film must lead to a conclusive encounter between the two men but The Crossing Guard has very little momentum for much of its 111 minutes.  Penn cross-cuts between the party which Booth’s friend lays on for him, where he meets JoJo, and Freddy’s evening at the club followed by the one-night-stand with Mia  – but there’s not much going on in either sequence, and no synergy between them.  Most of the very protracted climax is either glibly ironic (Freddy is pulled over for drunk driving) or absurd (in Booth’s pursuit of Freddy, Jack Nicholson proves to be a surprisingly strong athlete with stamina as well as sprinting ability).   The best bit of the last part of the picture is an intense conversation between a woman and a man on a bus which the two protagonists get on during the chase.  Penn conveys how the insistent niggling of the woman is going on in the background of both Freddy’s and Booth’s experience of the moment.   The worst bit is the final sequence:  the two men end up in the cemetery where Emily is buried, and which Freddy has never had the nerve to visit. Both at the end of their tether, Freddy Gale and John Booth are reconciled – and, we assume, ‘move on’ – and Penn is shameless enough to have Vilmos Zsigmond photograph a sunrise over LA to bring things to an uplifting close. It has to be admitted that the new dawn does come as a relief:  it’s been a very long night for everyone.

    6 January 2010

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