The Crowded Day (1954)

Review Essay

One of the gifts I get from writing this blog is tracking down films I’ve never heard of before, just out of a desire to add to the diversity of what I’m getting to watch as the marathon continues.  Today’s motion picture is certainly a prime example: The Crowded Day is, as far as I can tell, a nearly forgotten glimpse of post-war Britain, a movie that doesn’t even make most of those “Fifty Forgotten Christmas Movie” lists that proliferate across the Internet.  I had never heard of it before, at least—the cast is (with one or two exceptions) totally unknown to me, too—and so I’m hoping that, in sharing it here, I give it a slightly wider audience.

The light-hearted comedy is certainly where the movie spends the bulk of its time.  Young Peggy French’s storyline, for instance, is definitely a comic one—her beau, Leslie Randall, is too obsessed with his car, and so she engages in a little performance art to convince him that she’s ditching him for the store’s dignified and somewhat older personnel manager, Mr. Stanton, in an attempt to make Randall jealous enough to sell his car and devote himself to her.  Peggy tries to pull all this off without telling Mr. Stanton, which creates some amusing moments tinged with cringe as she insinuates herself into Mr. Stanton’s day repeatedly so as to make a spectacle of her apparent attachment to him, and the older fellow tries in every possible polite and civil way to keep her at arm’s length.  And there’s a lot of comedy here and there around the store, as shopgirls quip to each other (one tells another, in reply to a complaint about the supervisors, to vote Labour in the next election), and in particular in an extended sequence where one girl, Suzy, manages to trick Mrs. Morgan into wasting the afternoon on a fool’s errand so that she’ll stop stealing Suzy’s commissions.

The film walks a line, though, between the fun of this shopgirl life and its tragedies.  The heaviest story by far is that of Yvonne Pascoe, whom we’re introduced to as she’s getting out of bed and is clearly under the weather.  We gradually come to realize, through hinted comments and eventually plain statements, that Yvonne is secretly pregnant, and is desperate to make contact with the baby’s father, Michael, whom she hasn’t heard from in many weeks.  In this time and place, Yvonne has few options—she knows there’s no job for a pregnant shopgirl—and the movie does not shy away from how negatively people would respond to her revelation (Michael’s mother in particular is shockingly cruel), nor how desperate Yvonne would feel.  I was impressed that a film of this era would depict someone wrestling with the appeal of suicide as an escape from a life that feels “ruined” at such a young age, and it does so with some real gravity.

The film walks other tightropes in its balancing act, too: there are times, for instance, when the life of these shopgirls isn’t glamourized at all, and we understand how little they live on and how much they prize tiny victories and indulgences.  But there’s also at least a little fantasy here—certainly the opening sequences, in which these attractive girls are all running around in nightgowns teasing each other and interrupting each other’s baths, etc., feel more like the director wanting to imagine something idealized (and appealing to an imagined male gaze).  Sex and sexuality certainly is an undercurrent through a lot of the film: Yvonne’s aforementioned predicament, of course, but we also see several different variations on these young women and their relationships to men that remind us of the full range of treatment the shopgirls can expect, from gentlemanly to predatory.  It’s 1954, though, so the film is only going to explore these things in limited fashion, of course.  And I think the film’s premise is, itself, a balancing act: how do we tell satisfying stories that still feel like they could fit within the confines of one day, even if it’s an unusually hectic one?  There are times when I wish there was a little more air to breathe in the movie, and more of a chance to connect with these characters, who can become interchangeable, or who simply aren’t very easy to understand because I don’t know enough about most of them.

In the end, I’d say that the movie delivers on the simple promise of immersing me in this world and the lives of these characters, but it doesn’t quite reach the level of profundity it might have achieved if it could have helped me become more invested in most of their stories (Yvonne is a notable exception).  For people who, like me, find both the 1950s and British society fascinating, it’s a great period piece that will leave you wanting to see more of the world inhabited by the young women who work at Bunting & Hobbs.  One character, for instance, who doesn’t live at the shopgirls’ hostel, goes home instead of attending the staff Christmas party, and I get such a revelation about her life that I suddenly wanted a film just about her.  As Christmas films go, this one fits the genre really well—almost all the activity we see on screen is connected with holiday celebrations of one kind or another—while also not really giving us a traditional holiday experience, since the titular “crowded day” concludes before the celebration of Christmas has really commenced.  It’s not the first film from this year’s list that I would urge you to see, but if you try it out, I think it’ll be worth your time.

I Know That Face: Prunella Scales, who here is a customer named Eunice in search of a white nylon wedding dress, has some holiday media connections—she is young Vicky Hobson in Hobson’s Choice, my mother’s favorite film and one set partly on New Year’s Day, and she plays Kate Starling in two TV episodes of A Christmas Night With the Stars—but she will be most familiar to most of us for her work as the put-upon hotelier Sybil Fawlty in the classic comedy series, Fawlty Towers, which really ought to have had a calamitous Christmas episode but never did.  In The Crowded Day, Prunella shares the screen again with Richard Wattis, performing here as a bewildered man trying to manage a mannequin, who earlier in his career had also been cast in Hobson’s Choice, playing the part of Albert Prosser, the young solicitor.  John Gregson, appearing in this film as the gearhead Mr. Randall whose obsession threatens to lose him a girlfriend, showed up last year on the blog in The Holly and the Ivy, playing the role of David Paterson, the ambitious engineer in love with Jenny Gregory.  

That Takes Me Back: I know department store shopping still exists, but that crush of Christmas really feels like a childhood memory, to me.  The way we shop has changed so much, due to the Internet, the rise of big box retailers, and the pandemic, and while I don’t want to idealize old department stores as some kind of wonderland (this film sure confirms that they were never that), there’s a charm to it that makes me smile and think of the past.

I Understood That Reference: I detected no references to Christmas stories, even when one character’s stop inside a church gave us an opportunity for some holiday-specific messaging, and a more heavy-handed film probably would have seized such an opportunity.

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Holiday Vibes (4.5/10): Holiday shopping is very much on display, but that’s most of what we get—there’s surprisingly little talk about Christmas presents or traditions, and we basically never see anybody with their family doing more ordinary kinds of Christmas observance.  If you’re someone who still goes out and Christmas shops in person, or even if that’s just a memory of yours but a clear one, you’ll find resonant moments here.

Actual Quality (8/10): The film’s most effective, as I describe above, at evoking the world inhabited by the shopgirls, and whether it’s the screenplay’s dialogue or the acting performances, I think the film is least successful at helping me invest deeply in most of the individual characters.  Sometimes the film’s surprisingly strong at evoking feelings just through the editing and cinematography (there’s pretty intentional and effective use of Dutch angles, for instance, in the final act).  I think the overall effect is solid though not really spectacular: I can imagine many of you would get something good out of the movie and I would be surprised if it was (or became) anybody’s favorite holiday film.

Party Mood-Setter?  It’s a slightly missed opportunity, since I’m certain that portions of the film definitely could do this, with bustling store aisles and light-hearted banter, but the suicide subplot is much too intense for this purpose and would be very hard to ignore or set aside.

Plucked Heart Strings?  It’s impossible not to have some feeling for Yvonne’s plight, regardless of how you feel about how she’s choosing to handle the stresses she’s under.  It’s the strongest element in this film, there’s no question, for me.

Recommended Frequency: This film, as I’ve mentioned, was an unknown one to me, and therefore interesting to see.  I would certainly watch it again someday, but it’s more a social document of the 1950s in the UK than it is a holiday movie, and one I probably won’t return to all that often at this particular time of year.

How are you going to watch it, yourself, if you decide to do so?  Ol’ Reliable has our backs again—I don’t know how Tubi manages to get all these relatively unknown holiday flicks onto its roster each December, but I’m grateful for it.  If you’d rather avoid the ads, though, this one’s a very cheap rental right now, available for a couple dollars at Amazon, Google Play, or YouTube.  This is a rare film that’ll be nearly impossible to get on disc: there doesn’t seem ever to have been an American release, so Amazon will sell you an expensive copy but one you will only be able to watch if your player can handle discs from Europe, and Worldcat reports a mere 7 libraries seem to have this disc available in their collections.  I complain sometimes about our overreliance on streaming, but this is a perfect example of a film I basically could not have seen were it not for the streaming services.