Dance Hall **** (1950, Donald Houston, Bonar Colleano, Petula Clark, Natasha Parry, Jane Hylton, Diana Dors) – Classic Movie Review 1660

The music of Ted Heath and Geraldo and their bands helps to bring plenty of Fifties atmosphere and retro chic to director Charles Crichton’s underrated 1950 Ealing Studios episodic comedy romantic drama Dance Hall about four perky factory girls and their various romances, and make it even more interesting now than it was at the time.

It is significant also as more or less the one and only film produced by the Ealing men-dominated studio that can be viewed as an early feminist movie. It’s also important in its honest attempt to paint a down-to-earth and truthful portrait of Britain in its tatty era of post-war austerity. It even provides an early template for Sex and the City.

Natasha Parry (future wife of film and theatre director Peter Brook), Jane Hylton, Petula Clark and Diana Dors star as the four young working-class women in question, enjoying romance on their night out at the local dance hall, the Chiswick Palais. The quartet live in council flats, work together at a West London factory and find a mutual escape from their drab lives while dancing and romancing.

Apart from their middle-class accents, the playing from the actresses is nice and eye-catching and realistic, with Clark and Parry (in her screen debut) in particular capturing the feisty spirit of young, post-war English women relishing the glamour and excitement promised by the dance hall.

Sydney Tafler stands out as Jim Fairfax, the Dance Hall Manager, and Donald Houston, Bonar Colleano, Douglas Barr and James Carney are the other main male stars. Eve (Parry) is torn between glamorous sports car-driving spiv Alec (Colleano) and dull but decent biker Phil (Donald Houston).

And so now Dance Hall emerges as a highly intriguing, if slightly lesser film from Crichton, the director of such classics as The Lavender Hill Mob, Hue and Cry and The Titfield Thunderbolt, delivering the authentic flavour of its characters, time and place. We see London Blitz bomb sites and trolley buses, and hear references to the retail chain of fishmongers Mac Fisheries, BBC radio’s Music While You Work show, the football results and post-war rationing (which ended in 1954). Geraldo’s and Heath’s music adds a lot to the realistic atmosphere, also imaginatively captured by art director Norman Arnold and in Douglas Slocombe’s dramatic black-and-white cinematography.

There are loads of welcome famous faces to light up the film’s smaller roles, Kay Kendall (as Doreen), Eunice Gayson, Dandy Nichols, Michael Trubshawe, Harry Fowler and Doris Hare among them. And it is satisfying from the male-dominated gang at Ealing Studios to put the accent on the women for a change, trying to appeal mainly to a female audience for once. As such it was thought, even at the time, to be an unusual, even a bit of a revolutionary, departure for Ealing Studios.

Naturally it is written by two men, E V H Emmett (who also produces) and Alexander Mackendrick, but it is co-scripted by Diana Morgan, the sole woman admitted by Ealing boss Michael Balcon to his elite creative team. It tells the story about the four women and their romantic encounters from a female perspective, presumably Diana Morgan’s input, but on the other hand gives a big share of the running time to Donald Houston’s and Bonar Colleano’s characters, presumably E V H Emmett and Alexander Mackendrick’s input. And Donald Houston and Bonar Colleano are top billed over Petula Clark and Natasha Parry.

Surprisingly, it proved Diana Dors’s sole film at Ealing Studios. She remembered it as ‘a ghastly film – quite one of the nastiest I ever made’. The national treasure died of cancer on May 4 1984, aged 52.

Petula Clark’s last film to date is Never Never Land in 1980.

Petula Sally Olwen Clark, CBE (born 15 November 1932).

Eunice Gayson has the distinction of playing the first Bond girl, seductive Sylvia Trench, in the early 007 movies. She appears in the opening casino scene with Sean Connery in Dr No (1962), in which she introduces herself to Bond as ‘Trench, Sylvia Trench’ during a game of baccarat and says, ‘I admire your luck, Mr…’ and Connery replies, ‘Bond. James Bond.’ 

Eunice Gayson [Eunice Elizabeth Sargaison] died on 8 June 2018, aged 90.

Natasha Parry died aged 84 on 22 July 2015 on holiday in La Baule, Brittany, France, after a stroke. She was the daughter of film director Gordon Parry.

Filming took place in November 1949 and the film premiered on 8 June 1950 at the Odeon Marble Arch in London.

It was digitally restored and released on DVD in 2013.

The cast are Donald Houston as Phil, Bonar Colleano as Alec, Petula Clark as Georgie Wilson, Natasha Parry as Eve, Jane Hylton as Mary, Diana Dors as Carole, Gladys Henson as Mrs Wilson, Sydney Tafler as Jim Fairfax, Douglas Barr as Peter, Fred Johnson as Mr Wilson, James Carney as Mike, Kay Kendall as Doreen, Eunice Gayson as Mona, Dandy Nichols as Mrs Crabtree, Hy Hazell, Ted Heath, Geraldo, Michael Trubshawe, Harry Fowler and Doris Hare.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1660

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