It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) - film review

England, 1947.  Rose Sandigate is an ordinary working class housewife living in the East End of London.  She is married to a man 15 years her senior, who has two teenage daughters from a previous marriage.  Her life is drab and unfulfilled, a grubby struggle to make do on a meagre income, in a rundown terraced house.  Rose had begun to think that her life was over.   But then, one wet Sunday in March, her former lover Tommy Swann suddenly appears from nowhere.  He has just escaped from prison, where he had been serving a sentence for robbery.   Recalling their former happy days together before the war, Rose cannot prevent herself from giving Tommy what help she can.   She feeds him, gives him the little money she has, and allows him to rest in her bed.   It is only a matter of time before the police arrive and separate them forever...

This classic of Britain cinema is one of the best films to come out of Ealing Studios, and is an obvious forerunner of the uncompromising social realist dramas that would flourish in the 1950s.  It was directed Robert Hamer, one of Ealing’s most gifted filmmakers, who would direct some other notable films, such as Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), before alcohol addiction ruined his health and earned him a premature death.

No film depicts the post-war mood in Britain more effectively than It Always Rains on Sunday.   Today, it is hard not to be struck by the film’s bleak, almost cynical, tone and its complete lack of sentimentality.  It serves as a useful social document to the mores and hardship of those grim years of privation and post-war disillusionment, where the scars of war – both physical and psychological – were all too apparent, and where criminality was running rampant in the ruins of a shattered society.

The evocative mood of this film is achieved largely through Douglas Slocombe’s meticulous and atmospheric cinematography, which borrows from both French poetic realism and Italian neo-realism.  This is particularly effective in the film’s nail-biting conclusion – a dramatic nocturnal chase across a railway depot – which has a lush film noir look, which heightens the tension and shows just how tragically isolated the film’s two protagonists have become now that Fate has decided to separate them forever.

In what was to be her last film for Ealing, Googie Wither plays the central female character, a thick-skinned young housewife who, through no fault of her own, is slipping into a premature middle-age.  Wither combines a raw sensuality and a toughness which was exceedingly rare in British actresses at this time.  Her performance in this film is quite remarkable, very restrained and yet revealing so much beneath the surface – her character’s anxieties, hopes and quiet despair.   Not long after working on this film, Wither married her co-star John McCallum and went off with him to Australia, where they continued their careers – a happily ironic reversal of this film’s unhappy ending.

© James Travers 2008

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