Various (1955-57)
The BFI has good reason to be proud of these documentary shorts, which it funded more than half a century ago. The earliest of them, Momma Don’t Allow, describes Saturday night in a Wood Green jazz club (shot over nine Saturdays in 1954). The last in the sequence, Nice Time, is a Saturday night too – in Piccadilly Circus, in 1957. The longest of the trio, and in both senses the centrepiece of this screening, is the prize-winning Every Day Except Christmas, twelve hours or so in the life of the Covent Garden fruit and flower market (also 1957). All the directors concerned became internationally famous dramatic film-makers: Momma Don’t Allow is by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson; Every Day Except Christmas by Lindsay Anderson; Nice Time by the Swiss duo of Claude Goretta (The Lacemaker) and Alain Tanner (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000). It might not be quite right to say they all went on to better things: I much prefer Every Day Except Christmas to Lindsay Anderson’s best-known dramatic features This Sporting Life, If … and O Lucky Man!
I don’t think it’s just because of the jazz that I thought Momma Don’t Allow the least impressive of the three films. The music is played by Chris Barber and his band: they’re good and the dancing to their music is vigorously enjoyable (the film takes its title from the band’s vibrant climactic number). It’s fine when Reisz and Richardson point up the social differences of the people at the jazz club to dramatise the situation but a sequence in which a girl and a boy have a row then make up feels awkwardly staged in this documentary context. Nice Time, the shortest piece, is more confidently fluid in its montage of people arriving in the West End for an evening’s entertainment of various kinds – cinemas, clubs, pubs – and piling into the underground or lingering on the streets afterwards. It’s the sounds from these venues, from the national anthem to tube train doors closing, that Goretta and Tanner use for underlining. The combination of grotesquerie and unforced social comment in Nice Time is appealing.
Comment becomes commentary in Every Day Except Christmas, the only one of the films with a narrative, spoken by Alun Owen. His voice is mellifluous and his accent more emphatically Welsh than it might seem if the narrative didn’t keep referring, rather oddly, to England as ‘the whole country’. The effect is slightly theatrical but Owen’s quietness is well suited to the nocturnal setting of much of the action, as lorries start their journey from rural Sussex to central London and Lindsay Anderson then moves into the market itself, preparing at dead of night for opening in the early hours of the coming day. The film is consciously designed as a paean to working people but Anderson’s skill in observing them transcends his political intentions – so that the repartee among the porters in the market and the gallery of physical types and faces in the never-closing cafes around Covent Garden is exciting. They’re unarguably elements in an historical record but also fascinating as individuals (not least because we see most of them so briefly). There are more men than women in evidence but I think I found the elderly women the most extraordinary people in the film – the flower-sellers who come to pick up their wares from leftovers in Covent Garden a few hours into the market’s working day and, especially, Alice, the only female porter in the place, smartly turned out in her black coat and hat. The narration explains that she’s been doing the job for thirty-five years and that, when she retires, there will be no more women porters. It’s a striking reminder of how, in a period when female employment opportunities were so restricted, working-class women were still doing physically back-breaking jobs.
9 June 2011
