Review of Dance Hall

The Dance Hall and the Milk Bar.Two staples in the life of young people in the 40s and 50s.Pubs were where dad came back from Sunday dinner time before falling asleep in the easy chair reading "The News of the World and listening to Billy Cotton,leaving you to take the dog for a walk.The big band era was in its death throes,finally and belatedly expiring about time Bill Hayley's first records found their way over here. Ted Heath and Geraldo were the big names in the late 40s,capturing the best musicians as they were demobbed and paying them big money. The Locarno,The Lyceum,The Palais......girls and boys usually went separately,drank,if at all,sparingly,and danced every dance as if it were their last. They were almost entirely the province of the working - class.Pale, toughened by six years of war and deprivation, determined to have the good time denied them by a mad dictator,they had one night a week away from restrictive parents when they could be amongst their peers.Naturally enough they made the most of it.Equally naturally their behaviour became the subject of disapproving articles in the newspapers such as "The News of the World" read avidly by boozy dads before falling asleep in the easy chair after Sunday dinner....and so it went on. The film "Dance Hall" would have offered worried 40s parents scant comfort,showing some of the girls as being no better than they should have been as my grandmother would have said. In a world populated by spivs,"cosh boys" and Yanks a girl would be well - advised to keep her hand on her ha'penny. Beautifully photographed by Douglas Slocombe,"Dance Hall" is an important social document,a portrait of an age of - if not perhaps innocence - then at least optimism.It features a fine performance by the ill - fated Bonar Coleano who was to die in a car accident a few years later having established himself as English Cinema's favourite Yank.It is sad to think that the pitiful dreams of those hopeful and vital young people were broken on the wheel of hard grind. "Dance Hall" is a poignant reminder of the brief time when the world seemed to have been their oyster.