Lunch Hour

To be honest, I don't quite know what to make of this. The meaning of the late plot twist I think becomes quite clear in the last scene with the expression on Shirley Anne Field's face. However with a great cast, great direction and photography, I wondered if the story really merits the super treatment granted to it. The scene where male management jostle each other in their anxiety to impress the young women staff (with Nigel Davenport perfect) is as well covered as it is a near-universal phenomenon.

But rather than make it a subject for wit or drama as it might have been on the Continent - and the affair at least satisfactorily consummated, John (of Rumpole fame) Mortimer's intention is obscure. The earlier part has its witty moments and nice little comic cameos but Mortimer seems determined to ensure that nobody, fictional characters or audience alike, derives much joy from the rest of it. The story and screenplay perhaps were more suited to television - the series Tales of Mystery and Imagination for example. Well worth seeing however for a luminous record of a young Shirley Anne Field, the late-great Robert Stephens, other performances and London in 1961. Significant that a film with such good ingredients received not a single award. A shame that nobody got John Mortimer to re-write the script, presumably nobody dared?

Grateful that Talking Pictures screened it.

Robert Stephens was a fine actor who sadly ruined his looks life and career through heavy drinking.I remember seeing him with Maggie Smith in Private Lives.Here he excels as the carrier's husband looking for a fling with a young designer played by a vivacious Sally Anne Field.The first half of the film is much better than the second half,if anything it becomes unbearably pretentious.Filmed at Marylebone studios that there are lots of scenes shot in the area.However I found the most nostalgic scene to be in the cinema where the beam from the projector shines through the smoke with the audience puffing away.I remember it well.

Following from director James Hill's adaptation of Arnold Wesker's 'The Kitchen' 'Lunch Hour' was the second of two screen versions he then made of works by John Mortimer.

Originally based like his previous 'The Dock Brief' on a television play it manages to combine elements both of Francois Truffaut's comedy of bourgeois adultery 'La Peau Douce' and the scene in 'Duck Soup' in which Groucho Marx comes to blows with a foreign ambassador for a slight he hadn't even yet had time to deliver.

As in 'La Peau Douce' it depicts the trials of an illicit relationship rather than the pleasure to which the harassed expression worn throughout by a young Robert Stephens attests.

Bryanston Films were responsible for numerous highly underrated British b-movies of the late 50s/early 60s and this one, at barely an hour in length, is up there with the best. The narrative is simple - a young salesman (Robert Stephens) in a wallpaper manufacturer, trapped in a seemingly loveless marriage, meets and is instantly attracted to a newly employed designer (Shirley-Anne Field) at the works. They want to get to know one another better but privacy is hard to find. So he books a room at a nearby private hotel for an hour one lunchtime....and there the fun (though not the way he intended) begins.

There are two ways of looking at what happens next - either she is, in reality, somewhat unhinged and her subsequent actions are the outpourings of a hysterical individual or, and I prefer this interpretation, she cleverly turns his (white) lies around, deciding that she is worth rather more than the occasional lunch hour fling.

Either way, the conclusion, with him, visibly rattled, returning to his desk whilst she, yards away, continues as nothing has happened is rather chilling.

Field is excellent throughout this film and it's not hard to see why she attracts most every male she encounters in her job. Stephens also excels as the naive, rather gauche individual who, whichever way you look at it, completely misreads the situation.

Definitely worth looking out for with the bonus of some great location shots and a very poignant soundtrack.

Shirley Anne Field paints the designs for wallpaper. Robert Stephens is an executive at the company where she works. They fall in love, but between their jobs and their commutes to their homes, they have no opportunity to consummate their feelings.

It's based on a radio play by John Mortimer. Director James Hill opens it up with long, contemplative shots of where they work, where they lunch, on the street. Because of the source, there still is an enormous amount of talk, particularly in the climactic scene where they rent a room for an hour from hotelier Kay Walsh, and discuss the elaborate story Stephens has constructed to justify their short rendez-vous. As a movie it is charming but slight.