Bank Holiday

I don't think Bank Holiday is for everyone. This thought is reinforced by the other reviews I have read here. But I found the film delightful.

Set during a bank holiday in England, this summer story is about various people who make the trip to seaside Bexborough, filled with various hopes and dreams. During their excursions, they cannot escape the realities of their stations or of life, in general.

The primary couple--Stephen and Catherine (played by the beautiful Margaret Lockwood)--travels to Bexborough under the pretense of love.

There is a young woman and her girlfriend who make their way to Bexborough so that the one can represent Fulham in a beauty pageant. To win would fulfill their dreams.

Then there is a family (parents and three children) who fights the holiday crowds, seeking an escape from the routine of their lives.

The stories intertwine and overlap with each other and with other minor sub-stories, creating a most entertaining patchwork. Moments of comedy are juxtaposed with moments of grave concern. The mood shifts continuously throughout the well-written script.

Bank Holiday has a very strong cast, wonderful black and white photography, and a score that does not intrude. The stories are engaging. Recommended for anyone who appreciates character development.

Director Carol Reed's most famous creation is El tercer hombre (1949). Made just over a decade earlier, Bank Holiday (1938) is set on the other side of the Second World War, and the difference in the atmosphere of the two films is stark.

Bank Holiday takes place in August, as Londoners hurry to the seaside to enjoy a long weekend. The gallery of characters includes a young nurse (played by Margaret Lockwood), her lover (Hugh Williams), a family of five - with the mother (Kathleen Harrison) fashioning outré outfits and the father (Wally Patch) taking every opportunity to disappear into a pub - and a duo of girlfriends (Rene Ray and Merle Tottenham), travelling to attend a beauty pageant. Although she is supposed to be enjoying a romantic get-away in the fictional town of Bexborough (that part is acted out by Brighton), Lockwood's Catharine is preoccupied with the thoughts of a patient's husband (John Lodge) and the tragic case she left behind.

In its delivery, Bank Holiday is light-handed, playful, and non-judgemental. Characters frequently side-step expectations and norms, be it a misguided attempt to appear cosmopolitan, an extramarital affair, or theft. Yet, every single person is given space to become human, sympathetic, and complex; whether one is trustworthy is never truly called into question, and the police sergeant (brilliantly, memorably played by Wilfrid Lawson) will happily take a criminal on his word.

Without lingering on any conflict - and so stopping short of melodrama - Bank Holiday provides a realistic, if understated and codified, view of relationships and emotions: those often run their course, can be fleeting or shallow, but that is not an indictment on anyone.

Another curious aspect is the semi-documentary quality of the film. (Actual documentary footage of King George V and Queen Mary riding in a carriage during the Royal Silver Jubilee celebration of 1935 is included in a flashback, but the fictional narrative, steeped in the everyday life, also doubles as a faithful historical depiction.) One may discover that the Boots logo is still the same; that train journeys nowadays are - incredibly - an improvement on those conducted in England in the 1930s; that the modern ideas of comfort and luxury are quite elaborate in comparison to the ones enjoyed by Reed's characters. Unable to find 'room at the inn', hundreds of holiday-makers spend the night on the beach, under the open skies - in their usual clothes, with suitcases for pillows.

There is an ease to decisions, contrasted with a lingering unease in the background. The front page of a newspaper declares: 'War Clouds Over Europe'. A line of dialogue goes, 'Besides, you never know what is going to happen in the world nowadays. You got to try to be happy while you can.'

Try they did, and we get to see a glimpse of it still.

Three On A Weekend stars one of the cornerstones of Gainsborough Pictures Margaret Lockwood who is taking what they call in the United Kingdom a bank holiday. Banks have those extra days they close ergo the expression when folks can't get to the bank business stops so go and enjoy.

Lockwood is going on a romantic and illicit getaway with Geoffrey Bayldon who wants to keep his planned romantic rendezvous a secret. But right before leaving, Lockwood is involved in a case at the hospital where she's a nurse where John Lodge's wife died in childbirth. Lodge is just so immobilized with grief that Lockwood just can't keep a detached professionalism about him. Later on it becomes more than that.

There are a couple of other subplots about a beauty contest and a family of five going on their bank holiday, but the romantic triangle is at the center. The other story lines are woven into the romantic a lot like Magnolia or Crash or even Boogie Nights of more recent vintage.

Lodge is the younger brother of Henry Cabot Lodge, Ike's UN Ambassador and grandson of the older Henry Cabot Lodge the longtime Republican Senator from Massachusetts. Later on he too gave up acting for politics and was Governor of Connecticut. As an American he doesn't sound too terribly out of place in this British film.

This is an early film of Carol Reed who certainly would go on to bigger and better things. It's a pleasant enough romantic diversion.

Most people know the The Grand is in Brighton. The STOCK footage also looks like Brighton albeit a few decades ago; so am not sure what the other review is on about. I do agree that it is nice to see normal people avoiding the flea circus. I read in a review on another film that audiences were easy to please in the old days. Perhaps it was more that life is full up with blood, guts, gore and entertainment was/is suppose to be an escape.

I try not to compare apples and oranges, but occasionally am driven to it. Last night I watched Martin Scorcese's Shutter Island, an overlong cinematic puzzle jammed with references, a jumbled encyclopedia drawn up from it's director's lifelong adoration of the movies, a film that doubles back upon itself, a film at odds with it's comic asides and serious overtones (i.e. Nazi Death Camps). I found much of it admirable, more of it a chore to experience.

Three On A Weekend, also known as Bank Holiday is a remarkable document to come out of an England preparing for war with Germany in the not too distant future, an early lark from master director Carol Reed (The Third Man), a film that begins in a hospital with a melodramatic event, then churned into the lives of several groups of people who are jammed into holiday trains ending up at the seaside.

I found the one film so sincere in intent, so clear in execution, and felt with such fondness for the peculiarities of the human condition, that after a long, long night of immersion in the twisted labyrinth of Shutter Island and into the frenzied mind of Leonardo DiCaprio as he copes with his own sanity, that this simple trip to the beach (in black and white) and dealing with the romantic and social dilemmas faced by the average man was an entertaining relief; it was so clear that there would be changes, and not all of them simple- minded.

And that, I suppose is my point. Occasionally I weary of repeatedly bludgeoned with gore, visually assaulted with violent behavior, and mystified by unclear motivations; such an approach may be modern, but now and then I miss the spell of simple entertainment in a story of people I can care about. That's what Three On A Weekend delivered in spades, and that's why I recommended it.