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The Small Back Room
1949 Drama / Romance / Thriller / War
 Review
After an acrimonious falling out with the Rank Organisation, Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger returned to Alexanda Korda’s London Films
to make this compelling and almost unremittingly bleak film noir
thriller set in Britain during the darkest days of WWII. The Small Back Room is a complete
contrast to The Archers’ most recent films, Black Narcissus (1947) and The
Red Shoes (1948), lavish colour spectacles painted on a very
large canvass. It marks a return to the more confined, more
realistic dramas of earlier years. The Small Back Room is both a tense, enjoyable thriller and a fitting tribute to the unsung heroes who worked in bomb disposal during the war. The film is most memorable for the expressionistic sequence in which the hero, played to perfection by David Farrar, succumbs to an insane craving for alcohol and imagines himself dwarfed by a gigantic whisky bottle in a black void that is filled with ticking clocks. The other notable set piece is the suspenseful sequence near the end of the film in which Rice attempts to defuse a deadly explosive device. The tension is heightened by the fact that the audience knows that the character no longer has anything left to live for. Although smaller in scale than previous Archers productions, The Small Back Room is by no means a lesser work. The direction and writing are on a par with previous Powell-Pressburger offerings and the performances are faultless, particularly those of David Farrar and Kathleen Byron, whose portrayal of a strained relationship is bleakly poignant. The cast includes such familiar faces as Leslie Banks, Jack Hawkins, Sid James (future star of the Carry On films), Robert Morley and, making his screen debut, Bryan Forbes, who would become a notable British filmmaker in the 1960s. The Small Back Room is a powerful, masterfully composed study in human frailty, showing how the trauma of war impacts on individuals, resulting both in terrible personal anguish and acts of extraordinary heroism. © CinemaForever.com 2009 Write a review for this film...User Comments
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Director:
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Starring: David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Jack Hawkins, Leslie Banks, Michael Gough Synopsis
In the spring of 1943, Great Britain is losing the war against Nazi
Germany. Sammy Rice, a leading bomb disposal expert, is called in
to investigate a new kind of bomb that the Germans have begun dropping
over England. Disguised as a toy, most of the bomb’s victims
so far have been children, but no one has yet been able to get close enough
to the device to discover what sets it off. Although brilliant at
his job, Rice is afflicted with his own personal demons. He has
to take painkillers to counteract the constant pain caused by his tin
foot and he begins to suspect that his girlfriend Susan’s motivation
for staying with him is pity, not love. His physical and
emotional distress sometimes become too much and he takes solace by
drinking more than is good for him. Tired of the endless
bureaucratic intrigue in the Ministry of Defence, convinced that he has
lost Susan forever, Rice gets himself blind drunk. At this
crucial moment, he receives a phone call. Two more of the bombs
have been found and his assistance in defusing them is urgently
requested...
Credits
 More British Drama |
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© CinemaForever.com 2009