Week-end

Brighton is given another name, but it is clear that part of the film is set there. The backdrops especially during the night scenes are confusing as they look nothing like the city. Was Brighton ( and permission for filming responsible ? ) or was it confusion created by the director ? Carol Reed made some very good films, but this is not one of them. The confusion of genres is also annoying. Bank Holiday scenes juxtaposed with attempted suicide and childbirth death scenes. The main benefit of the film is to give a glimpse of the times and how much popular resorts were used just before WW2. Margaret Lockwood and Rene Ray give good performances, but the male actors are mediocre. Given these reservations the film is often amusing especially in the ' Brighton ' scenes but emotionally disturbing when the film becomes morbidly concerned with death. A project which to me seems clumsily conceived yet still has many good scenes in it. A banner in front of a Hospital needing more money at the beginning shows a painful relevance to today. Worth watching.

Director Carol Reed's most famous creation is Le Troisième Homme (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.

A lightweight piece that looks at the lives of people during the popular long weekend holidays. It has inventive funny moments and shamefully ends in a dramatic campy style. But worth the look if you are interested in the earlier works of director, Carol Reed.

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.

Guy's wife dies in childbirth, nurse says "do you want to see the baby now.?" Guy says "no, never", and nobody seems to think that strange, really?