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.

Tinsel, Till Receipts, and Trouble - The Crowded Day / Song of Paris review by griggs

Set across one long, frantic day and night in a London department store just before Christmas, this plays like a bundle of short stories tied together with tinsel and a ticking clock. The vignette structure works moment to moment — shop floor, back rooms, staff party — but step back and the joins start to show. The pace is breathless, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes too keen to move on before its ideas have had time to land.

What gives it bite is what happens beneath the bustle. The store runs on hierarchy: who gets to sit down, who absorbs the pressure, who’s expected to smile through it. Christmas doesn’t soften the class divide so much as expose it, and the gender politics are sharper still. Women do most of the emotional and physical labour, then take the blame when things go wrong. The darker strands — unmarried pregnancy, sexual threat, despair — feel like consequences, not shock tactics.

The cast keeps it afloat. John Gregson is effortlessly charming, while Josephine Griffin brings a seriousness that hints at kitchen-sink dramas just around the corner. Messy, uneven, but consistently engaging, it turns festive pressure into something revealing rather than reassuring.