The Small Back Room (1949) - film review

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...

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.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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