The Crossing Guard (1965)

D. Michael De Roma             
Colour

‘The Crossing Guard’ has to be one of the most oddly, yet delightfully, casted films in the history of cinema. It’s a long film and one that’s so plodding and lost in the minutiae of life that it frequently seems static; sitting inert and unmoving in front of the viewer as if indulging in some kind of boringness staring contest to see who will lapse into a coma first. But what will keep you watching – what kept me watching anyway – is the sheer ludicrousness of the casting, the absolute perverseness of who is on the screen pretending to be boring and oh so ordinary.

In Montreal, a middle aged European crossing guard goes through his day. He arrives at work early and chats briefly with the owner of a café, then performs his job of helping children cross the road on their way to school. One would have thought that a few shots would have been enough to illustrate what a crossing guard does (or a lollypop man, if you’re in this neck of the woods), but this is a sequence that goes on for a seemingly endless ten minutes. And in that ten minutes there are no speeding cars or arguing parents, there are just children being helped calmly and efficiently across the road. The crossing guard finishes his shift and wanders through the parks of Montreal, whistling away and taking in the sights – both of interesting monuments and passing young ladies in short skirts. For lunch he goes to a different café, but has almost word for word the same conversation as he had with the original café owner earlier that day. His afternoon is spent killing time in a museum and chatting vague current events with a friendly newspaper vendor. He then heads back to the school and there’s another ten minute sequence of him doing his job, as if we’d somehow forgotten the tedium of the first sequence. At the end of the day he wipes his brow and heads home, where he has a brief spat with his stay at home wife, before making up over dinner and settling down to an evening together. The film concludes with him setting his alarm, ready to do the whole day all over again.

The actor playing the crossing guard? Step forward, Sir Noel Coward.

The actress playing his wife? Ah, Gina Lollobrigida.

Oh, the style and glamour these two names conjure. The jet-setting caper movie they should have made together (although, let’s be honest, I’m not sure I’d ever have bought them as a love match). Instead we get them as dowdy immigrants in this slice of new wave realism; living humdrum existences in washed out and faded downtown Montreal. Coward’s acting choices consist of little more than sad eyes and the occasional smile. The script requires Lollobrigida to be more firey as his Italian wife, but the sparks between them (very predictably) don’t fly.

The casting director clearly had a great sense of humour or had taken vast amounts of acid in the run up to this film. The audience is left wishing that the director, screenwriter and cinematographer had similarly developed one or procured the other before embarking on the project.