Anthony Simmons (1965)

Two couples in London in the course of the early hours of a summer morning:  a hostess and a man she’s met at the club where she works spending a night together for the first time; a young married couple going through a routine – she’s left trying to get their baby daughter to sleep while he’s out drinking – that they know only too well.   The stories are intercut with shots of a female corpse being recovered from the Thames.  Is it one of the two women whose parallel stories the writer-director Anthony Simmons is telling us?    The exchanges between the couples are very precisely written:  the dialogue is sometimes stagy but, all in all, Four in the Morning illustrates very effectively how a film, even when the action is limited, can transform this kind of writing by placing it in a larger physical reality – can elevate it above what it would amount to within the confines of a stage set.   The London landscape against which the couples’ interactions are developed is emotionally various.  Sometimes it seems to endorse the way the characters feel; sometimes it gives a sense of bleak indifference to what’s going on between them.  By the end, the two relationships have become too dominant – with the landscape reduced to background rather than suggesting a world beyond the individual dramas.   Still, the melancholy beauty of the closing sequence – of commuters making their way to work across one of London’s bridges – does a good deal to restore the balance (as well as call to mind The Waste Land).

There’s a growing imbalance too in how convincing the two stories are.  The emotional movement of the fights between the married pair, Norman (Norman Rodway) and Jude (Judi Dench), is absorbingly believable.   It’s easy enough now to see this strand as a critique – on the cusp of feminism becoming a big socio-political movement – of male selfishness but the quality of the acting of Norman Rodway, Judi Dench and Joe Melia, as their friend Joe (really excellent in what look to be largely improvised sequences), complicates the issue.  Jude is a nag – and the oppression of genuinely felt misery makes her more of a nag.  Norman has charm when he’s being flippant:  the more serious he gets, the more fake he is.   Judi Dench is marvellous when the baby won’t stop crying, and in the moments when she nearly laughs at Joe, then pulls herself back because to betray any kind of pleasure in this situation would be a sign of weakness.  Anthony Simmons is very acute, in telling this story, about grown-ups’ childish routines of disagreeing as a matter of principle and to save face.  The acting in the ‘one night stand’ part of the film, by Brian Phelan and particularly Ann Lynn, is relatively weak but their different, vocally wooden style – hers especially – is still compelling and expressive, until the big argument between them.  Before this breaks out, the couple have seemed almost archetypal compared with the very particular individuals created by Rodway and Dench.  From this point onwards, though, their story becomes too similar to, yet a pale shadow of, the realistic one.

There’s an excellent sequence in which the men working in the morgue deal with the corpse from the river:  the physically clinical procedures are complemented by amiably superficial chat.  (It turns out the dead body isn’t either of the women in the story – although I assume Simmons’ point is that she could be any woman, including them.)  I don’t know at what times of day the film was actually shot but all the actors (Dench, Rodway and Melia especially) convince you it’s happening just when it’s meant to be happening.  The whole thing is accompanied by music that has a translucent, incisive ruefulness.  His involvement in an independent film like this in 1965 may come as a surprise – in the same year he produced excellent scores for, inter alia, The Ipcress File and The Knack … – but the music is, unmistakeably, John Barry.

21 April 2010