So how do you follow a grand Technicolor extravaganza like The Red Shoes? With The Small Back Room, if you’re Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A war movie set in 1943, even its title is telling us that this isn’t more of the same. And it really isn’t. A mid-grey hodgepodge in which nothing quite locks into place, deliberately, it’s almost experimental in its approach. Does this 1949 movie work? Depends what you mean.
The film was called Hour of Glory in the US, which makes sense, kind of, by the time you’ve got to the end of the film but none whatsoever for the majority of it, since it’s a story of the bureaucratic plodding that helped win the war, focusing on one brilliant mind, Sammy Rice (David Farrar), called in to help the military after the Nazis start dropping a new kind of weapon on the UK – a bomb that goes off when least expected.
Sammy is the existential hero before there was such a thing, on screen at least, a troubled soul wrestling with the pointlessness of life, attempting to hold down half a relationship with secretary Susan (Kathleen Byron), trying to stay away from the booze, which he uses to self-medicate the pain caused by his “tin leg”… and life itself. The doctors have offered “dope” but Sammy finds booze works better.
Sammy is also involved in the assessing of a new gun the military don’t much like the look of but the boffins are keen to push. This allows Powell and Pressburger to get out of the studio, to Stonehenge and Wales, before they bring this strange half-movie to a semi-thrilling climax down on Chesil Beach, where Sammy finishes the movie defusing one of the Nazis’ new fangled bombs.
A lot of this movie doesn’t quite make sense and a lot of it exists in a betwixt zone. Sammy the compromised male with his tin leg; the booze problem that doesn’t seem to prevent Sammy from having a beer at the pub; the half-relationship with Susan, who loves Sammy; the new gun that probably doesn’t work; and regular reminders that the bureaucrats Sammy is surrounded by are not part of a well oiled machine but something barely bumbling along.
Life’s a bit messy in The Small Back Room, which appears to be a bad movie by a great movie-making team. But then there are moments and characters that redeem it. Susan, especially as played by Byron, the secretary bridling at being relentlessly patronised by her boss (Jack Hawkins brilliant in full mansplaining mode) is a character from years in the future, as is Sammy.
The camerawork also makes it worth a look, with Powell and DP Christopher Challis nodding like crazy to German expressionism with their choices of angles, lenses and lighting, and at one point there’s a lunge into full-blown Dali-esque surrealism, when Sammy is stuck in a dream sequence fighting a gigantic bottle of whisky. There’s also a theremin on the soundtrack, which must be one of its earliest appearances (1945’s The Lost Weekend might be the first – pitch in below if you know better).
Michael Powell always insisted that Emeric Pressburger got a co-director credit on the films they made together as “The Archers”, even though it was Powell who did the directing. They were a creative team, Powell reasoned, which is why the pair generally also took co-writer and co-producer credits. That said, Pressburger wasn’t that sold on this film – “I regard it not Archers but your own baby,” he telegrammed Powell before it went into production – and only participated because a solo project he was working on fell through.
The result is a small back room of movie, in effect, probably worth watching several times to try and work out what Powell thought he was up to.
For those about to take the plunge and buy it, the Criterion restored version is fine with a bright, sharp image except for the odd scene that appears to have been sourced from next-generation material. Perhaps Studio Canal’s second go, releasing some time in 2024, will improve on what’s already very good.
The Small Back Room – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
