The Small Back Room

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 … Read more