[4] The Christmas holidays are approaching, and a group of shopgirls head to their jobs at Bunting and Hobbs, a busy London department store.

Peggy French is upset at her shopman fiance, Leslie Randall, because he refuses to sell his vintage car, "Bessie", that takes up all of his time and money.

She also refuses to let Leslie take her to the staff Christmas party that night and leads him to believe that she has been dating the kind but very proper personnel manager, Philip Stanton.

She tells Peggy that she urgently needs to get in touch with her fiance, Michael Blayburn, who left his mother's home two months ago to look for a job so that he could marry Yvonne.

Mr Stanton meets with Yvonne, learns she is pregnant, and tells her she will have to stop working, although she can have her job back after the baby is born and put up for adoption.

Meanwhile, shopgirl Suzy, who dreams of being a film actress, is seduced after the party by her date, a chauffeur who has pretended to be a director and promised her a screen test.

Eve Carter, a beautiful but mysterious model at the store, is shown to be secretly happily married to (and, it is implied, financially supporting) a man using a wheelchair.

[5] In the mid-1950s, Adelphi Films productions were usually considered 'B' pictures that were booked by theatres only as support for main features, or at selected provincial locations.

To that end, Adelphi subcontracted the popular stars John Gregson and Joan Rice from the Rank Organisation at significant expense, and invested in other aspects of the film.

The storyline involving Yvonne, the unmarried, pregnant shopgirl who contemplates suicide, was considered risque for its time, causing the film to be advertised as "not suitable for children".

"[11] Picture Show wrote: "First class film of the trials and tribulations behind the scenes of a big store one day during the Christmas rush.

"[12] Sight and Sound thought the film produced "evidence of Guillermin's gift (at least during the pre-1965 British years of his career) for bringing fluidly expressive technique to bear on seemingly workaday genre material... Talbot Rothwell's script combines light romantic comedy and engaged social comment (especially sympathetic towards a single sales assistant whose unwanted pregnancy means inevitable redundancy) with a finesse and potency missing from his subsequent Carry On assignments.

Beneath the seemingly cosy veneer there's a grown-up drama here about real people and stalled expectations in a country slowly emerging from austerity, and it certainly makes good on Adelphi's ambitions to match the output from Ealing or Rank in quality terms.

"[13] In February 2011, BFI Video released The Crowded Day on DVD and Blu-ray, along with the Guillermin-directed film Song of Paris, as "Adelphi Collection Vol.