Twenty-Thousand Streets Under the Sky (no 75)

 

by Allan Fish

(UK 2005 150m) DVD1/2

Coucher avec moi ce soir

p  Kate Harwood  d  Simon Curtis  w  Kevin Elyot  novels  “The Midnight Bell”, “The Siege of Pleasure” & “The Plains of Cement” by Patrick Hamilton  ph  John Daly  ed  Adam Recht  m  John Lunn  art  Grenville Horner, Christopher Wyatt  cos  Charlotte Holdich

Bryan Dick (Bob), Sally Hawkins (Ella), Zoe Tapper (Jenny Maple), Phil Davis (Ernest Eccles), Tony Haygarth (Landlord), Susan Wooldridge (Ella’s mother), Jacqueline Tong (Landlady), Ruth Sheen (Aunt Winnie), Kathy Burke (voice of Jenny’s landlady),

One of the most overlooked mini-masterpieces in recent TV history, nestled away in the schedules of fledgling BBC4, Hamilton’s tapestry is faithfully brought to the screen in three fifty minute instalments.  Each deals with the same set of characters – a bar waiter, a barmaid and a prostitute – and concentrates on each in turn. 

The first takes place in the eponymous pub where, in 1930s London, Bob is a bar waiter who aspires to be a writer, spending his time reading everything from novels to Gibbon.  Though he’s loved by his colleague, barmaid Ella, he instead is infatuated with a common prostitute, Jenny Maple.  She at first inveigles him into paying her rent for her and then, over the course of a few months, swindles him out of his entire £80 savings (you could buy a small house for that in the early 1930s), going off with other fellas while not even letting him cop the remotest feel.

            The second goes some way to show how Jenny came to be so heartless, detailing her fall from servant to two spinsters in Chiswick to the events of a fateful night when, after being involved in a hit and run accident, she ends up drunk and seduced by a cynical playboy living only for pleasure to escape memories of the trenches.  Abandoned by him, she descends into prostitution, and then into the all too welcoming arms of Bob.  And in the third, barmaid Ella tries to escape her love for Bob in helping her impoverished family, and she falls into the clutches of a seedy regular at the Midnight Bell, Mr Eccles.  When it becomes clear he’s very much an old school army type who sees women as creatures to be seen as flirtatious lovely soft fillies gagging for it, she runs away, only to find Bob has left to escape his woes with Jenny.

            The only thing that probably alienates some is how gullible Bob is in relation to his floozy, and yet that is precisely the fact that Hamilton is trying to make.  Time Out wrote of Hamilton’s original that “no other English writer has written so acutely about sexual infatuation, embarrassment and self-delusion.”  And not only Bob’s, for Jenny, too, is deluded, brought out of herself by the nearest she’ll ever feel to love for Bob, but too weak to resist the easy buck.  Curtis’ sense of narrative pace is masterly, and he is helped by four excellent central performances, with a creepily sinister Davis backing up fine work from the three younger leads, with Tapper – fresh from playing Nell Gwyn in Stage Beauty – once more relishing being cast as a whore, equal parts toxic and vulnerable (“you don’t want to go thinking about that” she admonishes Bob when mentioning the past, alerting one to misfortune in hers), and Mike Leigh favourite Hawkins heart-breaking as the taken for granted Ella.  Yet it’s in the little details that it works best; in the detailed period recreation, the subdued muted photography, the perfect costumes, capturing perfectly the shabby attempt at gentility, and in the superb musical accompaniment, not only from Lunn’s mournful score, but in the use of popular songs of the period, from the utter despair of “Happy-Go-Lucky You and Broken-Hearted Me’ as Jenny is screwed coldly in front of the hearth by her seducer to a delicious use of ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man’ in a bar where it’s rather Bob who can’t help loving his heartless tramp.  The biggest wonder is that, for all its drab realism, one feels cheated at not having sat down for a pint in The Midnight Bell ourselves, and have Tapper’s Jenny come up to you as you stare into the bottom of a glass and whisper “never mind, dear.  Better luck next time.”  If she does, say the same right back at her.