(aka "Shop Spoiled", aka "Tomorrow is Sunday")
1954, d. John Guillermin - Tubi
Taking place over just one day, the film tracks a few of the shopgirls' lives, starting with the congested morning routine at the women's boarding house. There's an impressive amount of exposition and set-up in these early moments, but if it's just your first viewing (and, really, who has actually heard of this film to have viewed it more than once?) it's hard to tell all these women apart. Except there's the blonde with the high, high hair (the impression is that actress Vera Day is the British sexbomb equivalent to Marilyn Monroe, but she has the same haircut my Gramma had her whole life, so it's hard to look past), and the woman with the short curly hair and the Geordie accent who's always eating (there's always got to be one in any ensemble, huh?)...they stood out. The rest, well, it was like the female version of Dunkirk, just a lot of pale, British brunettes on screen.
The film has a cast of upwards of two dozen characters to keep track of, of different levels of import to the story. There are the cleaners, the shopgirls, the management, and the men circling the shopgirls' lives.
The centerpiece story is the on-again/off-again relationship between Peggy (Joan Rice) and Leslie (John Gregson). Leslie loves his old jalopy (if you read an Archie comic, you should know exactly what I'm referring to) very much, and it drives Peggy crazy, so Peggy in turn finds any angle to drive Leslie crazy, including flirting with the much older head of personnel. The tumultuous flirtations of Peggy and Leslie continually draw others into its orbit, coming to a head at the big evening dance with Mr. Bunting and family getting sucked into their farce. It's pretty fun although not quite as sassy or go-for-broke as it thinks it is.
The second major storyline follows the dour, pouty-lipped Yvonne (Josephine Griffin). Yvonne is, to put it bluntly, depressed. She's been searching for her man, Michael, who has up and gone missing two months earlier. She's tried Michael's mother on the phone but she really hates her and won't tell her a thing. Yvonne can't hold her wits about her. The workplace is too chaotic and she has a 1950's panic attack and abandons her post. She races out at lunch and runs across town to talk to Michael's mother. When she tells her she's pregnant with Michael's baby, she calls Yvonne a slut and a street walker. For a 1950's film, it's downright scandalous how she talks to her. Late returning from lunch, she gets called into personnel, where she's told she has to go seek social services to help her through her pregnancy and adopting out her baby, and when that's all over, she can come back to work as if nothing happened. Yvonne, then steals some pills with strychnine in them and contemplates suicide and also is pursued by a sex pest in the streets. It's a damn grim storyline, capped off by the fact that Michael actually returned to the store and left her a message but Yvonne's bitter co-worker just couldn't be bothered. It's fucking bleak man. The rest of the film is pretty much a comedy, but every time they cut to Yvonne it's tonal whiplash.
There's more to the affair, including a commission-stealer's comeuppance and the running gag of an inept male store manager trying to help with a mannequin display.
There are definite delights and even a few shocks (that confrontation between Yvonne and Michael's mother is capital "h" Harsh! The music is ever-present and somewhat abrasive in a way that detracts from most scenes, but not enough to ruin any of them. The story's setting, both the cramped women's dormitory and the frantic-paced department store are both pretty much alien objects now, so there's a whole sense of not just another time and another place, but, like, another reality.
A compelling, charmer that goes down fairly easily...but what of Christmas?
Well, this is what you would call a movie set at Christmas time, and not a Christmas movie.
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