A woman (Shirley Anne Field), fresh from art school, starts a design job at a wallpaper manufacturer. True to form, the company is overrun with middle aged men who either transparently and creepily lust after the young women in the art department or who are bitter about the idea of women in the workplace in general. Oh, well, anyway, at the company she meets a man (Robert Stephens) who isn’t really either of these categories, but is instantly smitten with her anyway. Being relatively non-creepy, she ends up spending time with him and they attempt to embark on an affair. True to form (again), he’s in fact married so evenings are out (and her ladies’ hostel has a strict curfew and a no men policy anyway), so they try and get this going in the lunch hour. Any attempt at physical intimacy is rather quickly thwarted by the lack of privacy however. Eventually, he comes to the decision that what to do is hire a room, but his sense of nervous propriety apparently requires him to hire one at a prim and proper establishment rather than somewhere seedier where they might be more blasé about what was going on. He concocts an elaborate backstory for the proprietor (Kay Walsh) why he and his ‘wife’ need a room for an hour. This story however looks set to put a further strain on any potential relationship.

You might notice the lack of character names there.

Anyway, Lunch Hour is an adaptation of a one act play by John Mortimer. From what I can tell, the original incarnation is more-or-less a two hander, and consists primarily of the same stuff as the latter half of the film when they finally reach the fireworks factory hotel room, however the nature of film allows them to expand this and show the imagined life that the false backstory conjures up. This, I suppose, is comparable to Follow Me (1972), another film adaptation of a one act play that’s essentially a two hander with three people, although Lunch Hour is a good half hour shorter and, one assumes, more tightly budgeted. This is some fairly straight support feature fare, independently produced and clocking in at barely over an hour with a reported budget of £22,750 (inflation puts this at a little under £500m circa 2020) and everyone apparently working on percentages. Whether or not they got anything out of that seems debateable, as Duncan Petrie’s research into Bryanston Films† suggests that it likely didn’t actually see wide release owing to the demise of the short lived National circuit reducing industry demand for British films by a third (cinemas in the UK had a quota which expected at least 30% of first run exhibitions to be of (registered) British films, which the circuits took into account), taking with it much of the demand for B features.‡

I digress. Mortimer wrote the screenplay for this adaptation himself, as well as co-produced it, which was directed by James Hill (who also apparently did the music). He’s probably best remembered as the director of Born Free (1966), but at this time, he had mostly directed some Children’s Film Foundation efforts and some documentaries and glorified advertisements (or propaganda films if we’re going to be frank about the content of some of them) for BP, perhaps most notably 1959’s Giuseppina, a light weight but not wholly unpleasant slice-of-life short set in a petrol station (it’s a BP one, it makes really sure you see their logo whenever possible; I assume the idea is to make working at BP seem fun and whimsical rather than, you know, working at a petrol station) which somehow won the Best Documentary Short at the Oscars despite the notable handicap of being entirely fictional. The main antecedent of Lunch Hour however is probably The Kitchen (1961), another theatrical adaptation which focusses more on a slice-of-life over its runtime rather than any grand storyline, instead looking pretty much purely at the different relationships between the various kitchen and wait staff at a restaurant over the course of a service. That’s kind of digressing again, but it is indicative of the style that the film takes. It has a low key, naturalistic tone that serves the story well. As Field’s character starts to imagine the life that she’s been ascribed in her paramour’s story and we shift into a world of mundane fantasy, the simplicity of everything helps sell the emotions involved. The stakes are low in the scheme of things, lower than they even appear to be given as that section of the film isn’t ‘real’ within its world, yet Field gives an intense performance that sells the real issue at hand. She is not valued as a person, nor for that matter are women in the film generally; while the perverts and misogynists that pepper the world are obvious, her would-be lover, mild mannered though he is, allows his mask to drop with his convoluted story of her being his wife down in London from t’north for the afternoon while he’s working away from home long term so as they can discuss something very important that can’t be done over the phone but that he won’t say what it is and she’s totally going back this evening. There are various problems with this scenario even beyond what I’ve just mentioned* that just chip away at the idea that he is somehow much more honourable and worthy of her time than any of the other married middle-aged men haranguing her during work hours. Indeed, it makes one wonder about his relationship with his actual unseen wife. Of course, while she succeeds in extricating herself from that situation, the film is unable to really confront the Edible Woman problem; that is, she has navigated around the immediate issue, but the problem as a whole remains. Society has yet to change and the options available to her as a woman are the same as ever. While the film’s denouement seems optimistic, for her at least, the question of ‘what now?’ looms unsaid.

† Bryanston Films were one of several companies set up as a film production and distribution co-operative in the late ‘50s, which specialised in modestly budgeted independent films at a time when Rank and ABPC were reducing their output; the best-known films with which they were involved being an array of early Tony Richardson and Woodfall Films stuff, such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and A Taste of Honey (1961).

‡ Ooh, two notes so close together. The ‘National’ circuit was created as a replacement for the Gaumont circuit. Back when, there were three cinema chains that dominated the scene; Odeon, Gaumont, and ABC. They had their own deals and couldn’t show each other’s films. Anyway, Rank owned both the Odeon and Gaumont chains, but continued running the two circuits separately. With the rise of TV in the ‘50s however, a lot of cinemas struggled and were shuttered, and so they decided to combine them both the Odeon and Gaumont circuits into a single Rank circuit, picking the best of between the Odeon and Gaumont in an area to be the one to receive the new programme. The National circuit was created for those who weren’t so lucky (as well as, it would seem, unaffiliated independent cinemas). Rank obviously couldn’t cram two cinemas worth of films into one cinema, so the idea was that the main Rank circuit would get the cream of the crop from the various studio releases that its predecessors had exclusivity on, with the others getting shunted to the National circuit. Given as this essentially seemed to mean your film got a lesser release in lesser cinemas, it wasn’t a particularly attractive proposition for producers or distributors and didn’t take off. This ended up costing Rank some contracts incidentally; supposedly Paramount was sufficiently put out by Rank’s decision to relegate a Dean Martin film to the National circuit that they severed their contract, moving to the ABC circuit.



* Things like train times, and that they have two young children that she’s had to bring with her and leave with her sister-in-law who hates her while she meets her husband. As I say, it’s a very convoluted web of lies.