Ostensibly this atmospheric little 1940 number from director Walter Forde and starring Gordon Harker and Mervyn Johns is a murder mystery: a group of regulars in a London pub spend the night trying to work out who really killed an elderly woman and prevent the hanging of an innocent mechanic, engaged to one of the barmaids, the next morning. But the plot is neither here nor there, a rather unconvincing stringing together of clues that emerge throughout the evening.
Instead the film is about supping a light ale or seven, the bloke giving you a tip on the 2.30 at Newmarket, putting in for the Christmas club fund, and finding yourself in a lock-in after closing time. In short, it's about class and to be specific the working class in - what is to my eyes - South London. As someone from the area and with family there, the accuracy of detail is almost painful. These are salt of the earth types, who stick by their guns and woe betide anyone who crosses them. This line from Doris, the barmaid of a rival pub, The Shakespeare, is resonant of the spirit throughout the film: 'Ever since I was a kid I've known just how hard the pavement was. I've seen a broken bottle pushed in a man's face and I've laughed!' The upper and middle classes appear as unwelcome figures, unwanted and out of place in this world. A group of them appear in the pub at one point, coming in for a laugh, dressed up in their top hats and tails and silk dresses, and we feel that the sooner they're gone the better. Saloon Bar belongs with the great films about the London working classes: It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), Holiday Camp (1947), Hope and Glory (1987), Nil By Mouth (1997) and Vera Drake (2004
Saloon Bar is also about theatre. The film was adapted from a play and its roots are evident. Most of the action takes place within the pub itself while characters walk in and out, as if entering stage left and exiting stage right. In the first part of his essay 'Theatre and Cinema', the great French critic André Bazin spoke of the dangers of 'filmed theatre', but also admitted the debt that the one had given the other: 'if we insist the dramatic is exclusive to theatre, we must concede its immense influence and also that the cinema is the least likely of the arts to escape its influence'. Bazin argued that film should acknowledge the debt to the stage and harness its dramatic force, but be true to the medium itself and play to its strengths, which in many cases, pushed it beyond the power of theatre. I think the success of Saloon Bar is that uses devices like the tracking shot (there's a wonderful one in the opening scenes where the camera pans through the rain and over the 'Saloon Bar' sign on the window and into the pub itself) and the close up to great effect without feeling the need of some films to 'open' everything out. I've made the point before that I think the director Walter Forde is more comfortable within confines and set limits.
The film is not much more than a second feature, a mere seventy six minutes, barely longer than an episode of Lark Rise To Candleford. But the makers knew the value of not stretching a thing out, that a miniature can be worth as much as a broad canvas. The Knowledge believes it should be better known than it is.
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