‘Lunch Hour’: an experimental take on doomed romance
There is no shortage of films out there about torrid or thrilling love affairs. From Ossessione to Marriage Story and everything in between, movies about cheating spouses, marriage breakdowns, and unfaithfulness have dominated the industry for years, asking viewers complicated questions about the ethics of falling in love with someone you definitely shouldn’t be falling in love with.
In 1960, John Mortimer’s play about infidelity in the workplace, Lunch Hour, was first performed on the radio, making its stage debut the following year before becoming a feature in 1962. Directed by James Hill, it has since faded into relative obscurity (that’s unless you’re well-versed in British films of the era). Yet, it’s an underrated gem, blending absurdist humour with a surprisingly experimental angle to uniquely approach the morality of cheating and being ‘the other woman’, as well as the expected roles of women.
At just over an hour long, it can practically fit into your own lunch break, and Shirley Anne Field gives a fantastic performance as a young woman who begins an affair with her manager, played by Robert Stephens. There is an immediate power imbalance made evident—the man not only occupies a higher position in the workplace, but he is also married and several years her senior. However, when the pair try to begin their affair in a park during their lunch, it immediately becomes clear that kissing in a public place isn’t going to cut it.
Thus, the comedy ensues as the man seeks out a hotel to rent on lunch breaks, allowing the pair to sneak off for some illicit fun in the middle of the day. However, the man’s paranoid nature leads him to come up with an elaborate story to explain the reason for the short duration of his stay with a woman, resulting in him telling the hotel manager that the woman is actually his wife, who has travelled down from Yorkshire to see him for the day.
The humour is simple and charming, with the hotel manager constantly interrupting the pair, preventing them from executing their affair. This is when the film takes a more interesting turn, shifting to introduce a slightly surreal tone that blurs the lines between Field’s character and the unseen wife. As the man tries to explain the plight of this imagined version of his wife travelling down with two challenging kids in tow, we see Field play this role in scenes that take us out of the drama of the stuffy hotel room. Here, Field’s young protagonist, who just wanted the excitement of an affair with her boss, realises the gravity of her situation, forcing her—and us—to consider the implications of infidelity.
As though a real couple, they begin to argue about the wife’s assumed role, which is stereotypically gendered—she must balance cooking, cleaning, and childcare all day while the husband gets to go out to work in another city. We’re presented with some interesting and rather forward-thinking ideas about the roles of women in the home and the workplace here, especially at a time when second-wave feminism was yet to take off fully. Meanwhile, a general conversation about the inevitable problems of committing infidelity arises, suggesting that, for both parties, true satisfaction can never be achieved in this way.
Lunch Hour is an unassuming film full of witty dialogue, strong performances, and an experimental touch that separated it from many other British movies emerging at the time. The influence of the kitchen sink period is evident, but it is also so clearly indebted to European arthouse cinema, making it a rather overlooked yet unique take on the romantic comedy genre.
