For much of the 20th century until the rise of cheap package deals abroad, the British seaside holiday was a unique sociological phenomenon. Every summer bank holiday in August, hordes would descend on seaside resorts to jostle, be raucous, and have the time of their lives. It usually rained. This was all fertile ground for British cinema’s multi-storied films. Nine years after Bank Holiday, Gainsborough produced Holiday Camp, a similar package of wellobserved social details, humour, and melodrama, with a post-war twist. Five years later in 1953, British cinema’s holiday-makers gingerly took their first steps abroad, in Innocents in Paris. The Londoners of Bank Holiday travel only to Bexborough, an imaginary resort on the south coast (Hastings supplied locations). But Carol Reed’s nimble direction and Rodney Ackland and Hans Wilhelm’s clever if sometimes improbable script never leave us feeling cramped. Early on, the mother-to-be that Margaret Lockwood’s nurse has been caring for dies in labour. Her death and its repercussions shadow the rest of the film, for all the bustle of its working- class comedy or the spinning images of tawdry beauty contents, throbbing boarding houses, crowded beaches, and the rest of the seaside scene. Lockwood’s star rose considerably with her luminous performance as the nurse no longer in the mood to enjoy an illicit weekend with Hugh Williams in a posh hotel. Director Carol Reed’s standing also rose. And with good reason: for he treats every character, wise or foolish, with sympathy, and brings shape to a film that might not ring true in every scene but stays funny and moving until the end. Look out for Wilfrid Lawson’s late appearance as an unruffled, sceptical country police sergeant: scenestealing of a high order.

Geoff Brown