Rent The Crowded Day / Song of Paris (1954)

First Floor, Ladies' Underwear - The Crowded Day / Song of Paris review by CH

"I'm going to spend the evening curled up with a bookmaker." "I've seen better things wash up on Barry Island." "Wake up, it's Saturday - there's fish cakes for breakfast!"

How can so enjoyable a film as The Crowded Day (1954) be little known? It opens, as it ends, with Sid James muttering to himself as the night watchman at an Oxford Street department store. Many of the scenes were filmed at the now-vanished Bourne and Hollingsworth, which was sporting of its owners, for much of the action turns around chicanery, illicit passion, backstabbing - with the milk of human kindness distinctly semi-skimmed.

One can imagine that, in 1954, audiences were startled to be greeted, within a few minutes, by so many bathroom scenes. Not, one hastens to add, with Sid James, though he would doubtless have relished being there, for many of the store's female employees are housed in its own hostel and queue impatiently for an early-morning's bath, their knees duly kickiing upwards during discussion of the day ahead which is due to be capped by the store's smart Christmas bash for its staff.

Notable among the staff is Vera Day, whom one might easily mistake for Barbara Windsor. Never abashed by a man's approach, she is set on a film career, hopes pinned on the following week's screen test. One should not reveal any more about that. And the same goes for the parallel plot lines which defy physics by briefly overlapping before sundown - and beyond.

Scripted by the great Talbot Rothwell, this was an early work - with splendid cinematopgraphy inside and out - by director John Guillerman, whose later films took a different and longer turn, far from this portmanteau creation which, surprisingly, runs just over an hour and a quarter. In this space he manages to combine what must surely be the most unusual take on a bedroom scene (say no more) and some noir scenes replete with railway trains, a mewing cat and a rapist. Meanwhile, the staff surely deserved a bonus for dealing with such bolshie customers as Dora Bryan, Thora Hird and Prunella Scales.

If any film school needs an example of tightly-paced ensemble playing, this is it.

As for Vera Day swifly losing her much-craved earings, she might perhaps look in the bathroom-fittings department: one could push towels through them.