Saloon Bar

From 1940, the British "Saloon Bar" takes place mostly in a couple of bars as characters work to save a friend from hanging. Their friend, Eddie (Alec Clunes), has been convicted of killing an old woman for her money. The money hasn't been found; however, a list of the serial numbers were submitted to pubs and stores.

One of the bills shows up at the bar. The group endeavors to find out where it came from - is that person perhaps the murderer?

Warm film that takes place around Christmastime and is complete with awful carolers, one of whom is little Roddy McDowall.

The cast includes Mervyn Johns, Gordon Harker, Roddy Hughes, Elizabeth Allan as the condemned man's girlfriend, Joyce Barbour, and Judy Campbell. Allan is quite beautiful - I wasn't really familiar with her until this film. The acting was all solid from veteran character actors.

Recommended.

That it was directed by Walter Forde and starred Gordon Harker led me to expect a comedy, and it's certainly played with tongue in cheek, as well as frequently earthy touches (the plot nonchalantly throwing in both prostitution and bigamy).

Obviously based on a play, it never leaves the studio, but the material is lively enough (and atmospherically photographed by Ronald Neame) for it not to matter.

The fact that the plot depends upon the novelty value of pound notes dates it (as does the barrel organ heard outside on the street); while the murder itself recalls the Oscar Slater case of 1908. Amidst the large cast, Harker, Mervyn Johns, Eliot Makeham and Felix Aylmer were plainly never young. But the film's age is also signalled by the extreme youth of Martin Clunes' father Alec (who died fifty years ago), Roddy McDowall popping up under an umbrella as a little boy singing carols; and Mavis Villers, still propping up a bar over twenty years later in 'Victim'.

A forgotten comedy-drama from Ealing that rarely puts a foot wrong as it deftly picks its way between a number of plot holes and pays no heed to the implausibilities of its storyline. Gordon Harker is on good form as a bookie who leads an investigation by the locals of a pub into the wrongful murder conviction of one of their locals (played by Martin Clunes' Dad) who is scheduled for execution the following day. Mervyn Johns quietly tries to steal the film as that staple of the British local - the regular with his own bar stool.

This is probably the greatest film, set entirely inside a pub, ever made (admittedly a small field). The interest is not on the whodunit plot, and certainly not on the plausibility of the premise that the regulars in a pub could solve a mystery in a single night before closing time. But the combination of a group of vintage character actors doing their stuff, in a setting dripping with nostalgic possibilities, is irresistible. Mervyn Johns at his most lugubrious, spending virtually the entire picture on a barstool; Gordon Harker as a bumptious bookie; Roddy Hughes as a vague, cheery doctor; a wonderfully characterised set of bar staff; a hilarious group of cheeky carol singers (including the young Roddy McDowall). The film gives a tremendous sense of the small communities in the middle of London in the immediate pre-war, and the transient populations of rich and poor alike who might wander through. The historians and sociologists can detect the wartime social solidarity about to break down; those who lived through the times can enjoy the nostalgia. Warm, funny and brilliantly realised.

I watched an absolutely charming piece of British ensemble called of all things "Saloon Bar" (1940), with Gordon Harker, Mervyn Johns, Elizabeth Allan, Joyce Barbour, Anna Konstam, Cyril Raymond, Judy Campbell, and others (among whom is a very young pre-teen Roddy McDowall. Taking place basically in a single setting on Christmas Eve or thereabouts, in an evidently pre-war bar, the ostensible idea behind this piece is to save a young man from being hanged in the morning for a murder he didn't commit. But - how to prove it... This began as a play written by Frank Harvey (who also contributed to the screenplay) and then was put on the screen by Angus MacPhail and Jon Dighton. This is one of the four films on Volume 10 of the Ealing Studios Rarities series put out in Britain in the last few years (total of 14 volumes). Mervyn Johns sits on his bar stool during the entire film without moving, drinking, and making wry and sarcastic comments endlessly, deliciously. Elizabeth Allan is Queenie, a bar tending girl the hapless accused was seeing before his sentence. A competing bartendress from another establishment is Judy Campbell. The landlord of the bar where nearly all of the action takes place has an expectant wife upstairs, and it seems that she's been bearing first a boy, then a girl, then a boy, then a girl, in alternate years for some time now. Meanwhile, between endless quaffs of endless Lion ale, Gordon Harker is trying to figure out who really murdered the old lady the young man on death row is accused of killing. If all this sounds, perhaps, somewhat predictable, maybe even stagnant, or boring - trust me, it isn't in the least. It crackles with wit and wonderful acting and direction and atmosphere. It is indelibly British, the definition of it for Americans who think they know what that means, but who really don't. If you're into what pre-World War II Britain was like, this is the essence, a time and a culture that just doesn't exist anymore at all, but which is captured here in a water drop under the spyglass perfectly. Simply great!