Ummm, remember, she has a head, too.
The British Stormy Monday (1988) suffers from a common affliction of the British cinema of that era, a quality I’ve referenced before, somewhat mystifyingly, as brittleness. This story follows the tale of Brendan, a down on his luck Brit who decides to take a cleaning job with Finney, a club owner in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he first demonstrates his cleaning skills and is then given an emergency assignment to pick up a group of jazz musicians who’ve arrived early from Poland and without documentation at the airport (or perhaps it was a naval port).
In a separate thread, Mr. Cosmo of New York City contacts Kate, a pleasant young red-head, and requests her to show up and render professional assistance (of what sort is never clarified, which I found very irritating) in his quest to do … something. He’s apparently some sort of businessman who is being brought in by the City government to help resuscitate a moribund neighborhood. Or perhaps the entire city. It may be this lack of attention to detail which imparts a sense of brittleness to the entire movie.
But back to Kate, as she makes her way to assist Mr. Cosmo, she runs into Brendan, quite literally, but no one is hurt. A little later, we discover she has a second job waitressing at a bar, in fact just around the corner from Finney’s club – where Brendan is slaking the pains of the day away and meets her again. On impulse, he asks to meet her for drinks once her shift is over, and she agrees. Later, during the drinks, she disappears for a moment, and Brendan overhears a couple of toughs discussing a contract they’ve received to work over Finney.
Brendan and Kate finish their date, and Brendan notifies his employer of the impending violence to be inflicted on his person. The tables are turned and the toughs turned away, in a very nice scene. We soon discover the toughs were hired by Mr. Cosmo, who apparently wants Finney’s club. Why?
We don’t know, really. It’s merely a knob on the plot, it exists to bring out some conflict without any real motivation.
A little more to-ing and fro-ing, Kate and Brendan get a very tough reputation, a jazz musician goes out in a burst of fame flame, and that more or less wraps things up. We were neither upset nor shocked by the plot, even if we couldn’t spell it out from afar.
This is because we didn’t really care, and that’s a shame. The acting seemed competent enough to me, certain scenes are enacted with a fine eye to detail and psychology, and the moviemakers seemed fairly bold. But there were disconnects, such as the aforementioned mysteries of Kate’s profession and Mr. Cosmo’s desire for Finney’s club – and how he goes about it. It’s as if the story-tellers didn’t really much care about the story they were telling, and that indifference carried throughout what I suspect could have been an interesting, even compelling movie.
But it’s not.
Too bad.
