Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of its first release of The Small Back Room; the Powell and Pressburger WW2 set film is about political intrigue and psychological drama.
Starring David Farrar and Kathleen Byron – two actors who worked with P&P on Black Narcissus in 1940. Farrar portrays Sammy Rice, the finest bomb disposal expert in the army who was injured during the war.
He begins an affair with Byron’s Susan, a secretary in the war office. However, Sammy is haunted by his failings as a man owing to the injuries he has sustained, and his ability to be a lover to Susan due to his inferiority complex. He drowns his sorrows in whiskey nightly to the detriment of his ability to perform a great service to the continuing war effort.
Nazi Germany is still dropping booby-bombs on Britain, a bomb has exploded causing catastrophic results and another has been found which has not yet exploded. This opportunity provides Sammy with a chance of retribution and to face down his demons.
The film does have its flaws, the first period of the film drags as we are unsure fully of the stakes and the will-they, won’t-they relationship is one which should not be frowned upon as much as it seemingly is between two single people, but that was the attitude of society back then.
The film does, however, pick up speed in the final act when Sammy stands up to be counted to his superiors and help avert disaster.
Based upon the 1943 novel of the same name by Nigel Balchin, the film was received as another win for The Archers, and when released in 1949 it was marked as a slow down for the team after the triumph and masterwork that was The Red Shoes in 1948.
Think of the Coens’ A Serious Man or Scorese’s Bringing Out The Dead; films that are not as highly thought of in the director’s oeuvre yet they are deeply personal and intuitive to the sense of their overall body of work. In The Small Back Room, P&P’s look at an individual and the psychological complexity that the war will have upon individuals and how it seeped into everyday life and following on from Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend in 1945, this is a serious depiction of alcoholic dependency.
Yet there are archetypes of P&P’s motifs here – location shooting, issues of class and status, off the wall moments such as Sammy’s final descent and lush production design. A film that that serves as a reminder that even a flawed film by masters can still maintain attention and suspense.
When is the 4K UHD release of The Small Back Room?
The 4K restoration from Studiocanal will be available on Blu-Ray, DVD and Digital from 3rd June and will have a premiere at BFI Southbank on 28th May.
Released by Studiocanal in a new restoration led by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker (Powell’s widow) from the Film Foundation. The digital release features documentaries on restoring The Small Back Room, Kevin MacDonald on the Small Back Room, Ian Christie ‘Defusing the Archers’, an audio commentary by film scholar Charles Barr and an interview with the film’s cinematographer Christopher Challis.
Chatter Box Film 