On the Buses (Harry Booth, 1971)

 

This spin-off from a British TV sitcom of the time has to be seen to be believed, which isn’t the same as saying it has to be seen; when I saw the film it was preceded by a warning from the broadcaster citing its outdated cultural attitudes, and that's just for starters. Stan and Jack, driver and conductor on a double-decker bus, are primally threatened when their employer tackles a staff shortage by employing a group of women drivers; the threat is both financial (no more overtime), and sexual (as conductors, women are “available,” but as drivers they’re not). When the women thwart the initial predictions by being basically capable, Stan and Jack set out to undermine them through such devices as planting spiders under their seats and spiking their tea with diuretics. Like so many sex-crazed British movies of the period, the film’s visual unsubtlety hurts the eyes (no “painting with light” here!), and the subtext is drably miserable: at an unspecified advanced age (the actor Reg Varney was in his mid-50’s) Stan lives with his mother, his married sister and her miserable husband in cramped quarters, their finances so unstable that when the overtime gets cut back they have to let go of the washing machine; the devotion to getting a bit of “crumpet” can only sustain its mechanical single-mindedness because it’s basically all there is to keep these wretched people going. The movie lacks any shred of basic human decency and warmth, seeming particularly brutal in its treatment of Stan’s sister Olive, presented as being slow-witted to the point of near-dysfunction, although Stephen Lewis’ portrayal of the put-upon inspector Blake approaches something oddly touching in its pathos. Several of the actors barely found work again after the series (and two further spin-off films) went off the air, a fate which gives their unrestrained excesses a rather macabre undertone, the one respect in which the film might reflect the broader tradition of the originating Hammer Studios…