Film review: Bank Holiday (1938)

I must admit I felt very impatient with just about every character in this film at one point or another.  We found it because it was Margaret "The Lady Vanishes" Lockwood's first big film (immediately before that one, actually) and, to be sure, she's very good in it, and, get this, it was directed by Carol "The Third Man" Reed... but...  That said, it's a fascinating slice of pre-WWII class-ridden British life, and everyone in it is good, it's just very frustrating to see everyone essentially so trapped.  The set up is that Lockwood is a nurse, Catherine, whose patient is an expectant mother having unspecified difficulties.  She feels for the father, who is a rather simpering toff in my estimation, who completely collapses when (inevitably) the wife dies in childbirth.  (And he rejects the baby, who survives, and won't even look at it!  And this doesn't turn her against him.)  In a case of bad timing, she is late for the train to a hot bank holiday weekend with her "friend" Geoff, who has been saving for months to afford the best hotel in "Bexborough" (Brighton?) and insufficiently enthusiastic when she gets there.  Geoff gets all pouty (every man in this film is obnoxious) even after she explains that her patient died, and is instantly suspicious (rightly, it turns out) that she's fallen for the husband (whom we see wandering about London, having every landmark remind him of his dead wife, in scenes intercut throughout the film) whose lighter she still has.  Also on the (ridiculously crowded) train are: a working class family, consisting of a fat husband, harried wife, obnoxious two boys and toddler girl, 

and a pair of young women, one of whom is "Miss Fulham," off to the Miss England pageant in Bexborough, 

and frantically jealous of the Miss Mayfair, who is also on the train, and getting all the attention.  These provide what passes for comic relief, although some of it is a bit too close to the bone (especially when the fat husband abandons his family to go to the pub - but don't worry, the wife eventually grows a spine by the end of the film, thanks to a dance with Geoff of all things).

Anyway, there are (predictably) no rooms at the inn, so everyone has to bunk down on the (crowded) beach.  The next day is more fun 

but Catherine can't stop thinking of the bereaved husband, and eventually gets it into her head that something terrible is going to happen to him and ditches Geoff (who ends up with Miss Fulham, who misses her competition to commiserate with him (she has also been dumped)) and catches a ride with the dishonest manager of a troupe of boardwalk entertainers absconding with the take.  Meanwhile our widower has been shown reading Shelley poems lauding suicide and somehow has access to a sophisticated chemistry set that can produce poisonous gases.  Will Catherine get there in time to save him?  Well, watch it if you're a Lockwood completist, but you can probably guess the answer.