Bank Holiday Nostalgia Trip

August Bank Holiday always used to be my favourite bank holiday, marking, as it usually does, the last full weekend of Summer, giving everyone an extended break to enjoy the good weather.  (OK, so, particularly when I was a kid, it always seemed to rain over the long bank holiday weekend, but it is the thought that counts).  This, despite the fact that, for the past couple of decades, I've always been on holiday anyway during the August Bank Holiday, so it didn't really make any difference to me, but I just liked the idea of there being this communal late summer experience going on across the UK.  But I have to say that since I went into this current state of semi-retirement, I've noticed this and any other Bank Holiday less and less.  When there is no work to escape from, these days off seem less significant, not only that, but not being part of the world of work, to some degree, detaches you from the 'mainstream' of life, reducing that sense of participating in communal experiences.  (Not that I was ever that attached to the 'mainstream' as it was).   So, this bank holiday almost passed me by - I even ended up doing my shopping as usual for a Monday today, (the bank holiday did mean that the supermarket was pretty much empty, which was great and it means that I'm free to enjoy the tail end of the season for the rest of the week).   

Apart from shopping, I spent a large part of the weekend back in the sixties a seventies, or at least the cinematic universe of those decades.  I've mentioned before that I've currently got access to a streaming channel exclusively showing seventies movies - yesterday it came up trumps with a showing of the 1973 Burt Reynolds private eye movie Shamus, which I hadn't seen in years.  Watching it again reinforced my memory of it being one of those films you feel should be better than it actually is.  It has a typically engaging and charismatic lead performance from Burt Reynolds and a terrific supporting cast including Dyan Cannon and Joe Santos.  It also has some great location shooting in and around early seventies New York, which really gives it a firm sense of time and place.  On top of that, it has some excellent action set pieces, all well handled by director Buzz Kulik.  Yet, it never really seems to come fully to life.  The fault seems mainly to lie with the script which, despite some snappy dialogue, never really seems to be able to properly articulate its plot - it never establishes any rhythm and feels disjointed in its development.  Which is a pity as, on paper, Shamus should have been a hugely entertaining comedy thriller.  As it is, it isn't a bad film, but it just never manages to live up to expectations.

By contrast, late on Sunday, so late, in fact, that it was probably Monday morning, I decided, for some reason, to watch It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) again. I honestly don't know what prompted this, other than I had at the back of my mind that this was one of the quintessential bank holiday movies, (it always seemed to get a TV showing over bank holiday weekends when I was a kid).  It had the advantage for TV networks of being so long that it filled up an entire afternoon.  Anyway, I ended up watching the entire two and three quarter hour long general release version, the one that is usually shown on TV, (although it is often shortened by removing the intermission and opening and closing musical overtures).  The original Cinerama version ran over three hours - the cuts made for the general release version resulting in Buster Keaton, despite being billed on the opening credits, appearing only in long shot near the end of the movie.  The truth is that it isn't really, by today's standards anyway, a particularly funny movie, but is a particular place in my affections as I've also seen it on the big screen.  When I was at school, toward the end of the school year, in June or July, we'd get taken to see a special screening of a very long film at the local Odeon, in order to fill up one of those dead days toward the end of term.  One year it was The Alamo, another it was It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.  Seeing it on the big screen allowed me to properly appreciate the sheer scale of the film's production.  It is a truly impressive production on a technical level, despite the inadequacies of the script.  One of the fascinations of watching it, of course, lies in spotting everyone who appears in it - of course, as a kid, about the only people I recognised were Terry-Thomas and Phil Silvers, but later I came to recognise all the, then, popular US TV stars in the film, as well as the various old time stars in cameos.  I did recognise two voices though: the two garage mechanics were played by Arnold Stang and Marvin Kaplan, who provided the voices, respectively, for Top Cat and Choo Choo in the Top Cat cartoons.

All in all, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World provided an enjoyably nostalgic trip into the early hours of the August Bank Holiday.  While my TV viewing of it couldn't do full justice to its scale, (as that cinema screening I saw as a kid did), the version I managed to stream was of excellent quality, with good sharp colours, (the sixties California beach side town setting of parts of the film are tremendously evocative of their era and left and indelible impression upon me).  So, that was my bank holiday weekend - a trip back to the sixties and seventies.