There aren’t many straight arrows in the British thriller It Always Rains on Sunday. Most of its characters are schemers or chisellers, people on the make or on the take, they’re liars, crooks or worse. When the film debuted in 1947, the people of Bethnal Green, where it’s set, objected strongly to the way it depicted their community. Unconcerned, the British public went to see it in droves. Later, when it got re-released in the early 2000s, having been given a digital wash and brush-up by the British Film Institute, American critics also raved – “a masterpiece of dead-ends and might-have-beens,” said The Village Voice. “Artful and iconoclastic,” said The New Yorker.
It operates on several levels and it’s the way they’re tied together that lifts the film from the common run. On one, the interlinked lives of a community in London’s East End, centred on the comings and goings of the Sandigate family – decent dad George (Edward Chapman) and his wife Rose (Googie Withers), who’s the slightly wicked stepmum to George’s daughters, good girl Doris (Patricia Plunkett) and bad girl Vi (Susan Shaw).
Around them swirl the likes of Morry Hyams (Sydney Tafler), the womanising owner of a record shop and part-time saxophonist who’s got the eye for Vi. His brother Lou (John Slater), a low-level crook who wouldn’t mind a pop at Doris. A trio of petty burglars who’ve just turned over a factory and come away with a haul of roller skates, which they’re having trouble fencing. And a copper, Detective Sergeant Fothergill (Jack Warner, who specialised in affable neighbourhood policemen).
Into this mix of humanity comes escaped convict Tommy Swann (John McCallum), on the run, soaking wet and hungry when he pitches up at the house of former girlfriend Rose and begs her to help him. She still loves him, the fool, and so does.
With the action set all in the course of one rainy Sunday in March, these various little dramas and the one big one of the escaped man now all play out against a backdrop of a country stoically recovering from war – bomb sites abound, the local church is missing its steeple.
Made by Ealing Studios and quite obviously not one of their famous comedies, it paints a particularly stark picture of the times that’s very much against the grain of the usual Ealing output. There are chirpy Cockneys and scenes set on a teeming market but there are no rose tints. Life is tough. People are on the make because that’s how people who don’t have very much get by.
The script is particularly good, a light, bright, funny and fast-moving affair written by Hitchcock alumnus Angus MacPhail, Henry Cornelius (who’d go on to be a director) and Robert Hamer, who directs here.
Hamer is best known as a comedy director – Kind Hearts and Coronets and School for Scoundrels – but proves here, if you’ve never seen horror compendium Dead of Night or the crime drama The Spider and the Fly, that he was actually good at pretty much everything. He brings the little poetic-realistic touches but also proves himself adept at the grand cinematic set piece. The early shot on Petticoat Lane Market is a marvel of choreography and slinky crane-and-camera coordination.
So we can forgive that shockingly bad model shot near the end, when Tommy has finally been flushed out of the Sandigate’s tiny house, and is heading for a noirish showdown in some fantastically atmospheric shunting yards. Atmospheric and fantastic apart from the model shot with, I’m guessing, toy soldiers standing in for human beings.
The wobble apart, it’s a thrilling finale to a film that up to this point has free-formed along much as a soap opera would. The film’s often sold as a film noir, or as a late arrival on the poetic-realism scene but it doesn’t fit snugly in either category. Others say it’s an early kitchen sinker. Yes, that as well. And the acting is really very tidy too.
It Always Rains on Sunday – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
