Googie Withers

It Always Rains on Sunday

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Rose and escaped criminal Tommy embrace

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 … Read more

Night and the City

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Harry with a silhouette of St Paul's Cathedral behind

Night and the City is often described as the best film noir out of the UK. It was made by an American director with a French sounding name, Jules Dassin, which is poetically appropriate at least since the US is the home of noir and it was the French who coined the term. The title is surely the noirest of the noir – both night and the city are key elements of the genre. But this is London-based, and with a vengeance. Dassin, having fled the House UnAmerican Committee’s McCarthyite witch hunt after taking Twentieth Century-Fox’s Darryl F Zanuck’s advice to make himself scarce and head to London, took full advantage of a … Read more