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The Small Back Room (1949) [The Criterion Collection #441 - Out Of Print] [Re-UP]

Posted By: Someonelse
Date: 8 Apr 2015 10:19:00
The Small Back Room (1949) [The Criterion Collection #441 - Out Of Print] [Re-UP]

The Small Back Room (1949)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 4:3 | Cover+Booklet | 01:47:42 | 6,21 Gb
Audio: English AC3 1.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English SDH
Genre: Romance, Thriller | The Criterion Collection #441

Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Stars: David Farrar, Jack Hawkins, Kathleen Byron

After the lavish Technicolor spectacle of The Red Shoes, British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger retreated into the inward, shadowy recesses of this moody, crackling character study. Based on the acclaimed novel by Nigel Balchin, The Small Back Room details the professional and personal travails of troubled, alcoholic research scientist and military bomb-disposal expert Sammy Rice (David Farrar), who, while struggling with a complex relationship with secretary girlfriend Susan (Kathleen Byron), is hired by the government to advise on a dangerous new German weapon. Deftly mixing suspense and romance, The Small Back Room is an atmospheric, post–World War II gem.

IMDB | Criterion - OUT OF PRINT | Wikipedia | Noir Of The Week | Amazon

Following a postwar trilogy of eye-popping, thinking persons' Technicolor spectacles, the British filmmaking duo known as the Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) scaled down and returned to black and white with this character study of an alcoholic munitions researcher, nestled in the shell of a wartime suspense drama. Had The Small Back Room been produced at the time of its 1943 setting, it would likely have had a more propagandistic accent; made six years later, it can afford to focus on how the personal crisis of Sammy Rice (dark, gloom-laden David Farrar) is fed and resolved by his labors on behalf of "the Kingdom" in the titular, anonymous lab room. Fresh mid-war vernacular like "Gerrie is no gentleman" survives in the dialogue, but the emphasis is on Sammy's teetering on the abyss of a living death, and the efforts of the weapons unit's secretary, his codependent lover Susan (Kathleen Byron, who lusted for Farrar in the Archers' Black Narcissus), to pull him back.

The Small Back Room (1949) [The Criterion Collection #441 - Out Of Print] [Re-UP]

Hobbled by the pain of a metal prosthetic leg (the source of his disability is never revealed), Sammy habitually retreats to where the camera first finds him (after a pan of his empty flat, unanswered phone ringing)—self-medicating at the local pub until he's fished out by Susan for a late-night consultation. An army captain (Michael Gough) enlists him in the effort to analyze booby-trapped bombs the Germans have been dropping over England; after several reels of Sammy ranting at bureaucrats, telling Susan he's no good for her (with typical Archer hero aplomb: "You've got it all worked out in the way women always have. They don't worry about anything except being alive or dead"), and grimly sweating through temptation and binges (in one Daliesque montage, with a giant whisky bottle filling his room), it's inevitable that when the call comes to defuse one of the explosives, he's soused, and that the device he'll have to defuse (in a cunningly nerve-pricking climax) is shaped something like a decanter.

The Small Back Room (1949) [The Criterion Collection #441 - Out Of Print] [Re-UP]

After the prestige and box-office success of The Red Shoes, Small Back Room failed with U.K. audiences who'd presumably had their fill of "war films." What they missed was one of the period's most piercing, emotionally anguished romances between embittered, self-destructive Sammy and the long-suffering, tough-loving Sue, with performances by Farrar and Byron that one associate of the production termed "too real." Placing Sammy's alcoholism into the redemption-ready booby-trap plot, and within the urgent homefront milieu, has let Small Back Room age better than Billy Wilder's dipso-melodrama The Lost Weekend of just four years earlier, the wildly expressionist whisky nightmare notwithstanding. The Archers' reliable eye for actors, too, pays dividends in the large cast, from Cyril Cusack's stuttering, domestically beset fuse expert to a Robert Morley cameo as a clueless government minister. Pressburger's scenario and Powell's lensing occasionally escape the office and apartment sets (to the couple's weekly nightclub outing…and a weapon test at Stonehenge!), most memorably in the climactic sequence where Sammy must uneasily prove, by poking at a bomb canister sunken in a pebbled beach, whether he can dodge the destiny of being a man "it's just too bad about."
Slant Magazine
The Small Back Room (1949) [The Criterion Collection #441 - Out Of Print] [Re-UP]

Especially when compared with the opulent Technicolor melodramas that preceded it–Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), as well as the aesthetically daring fantasy A Matter of Life and Death (1947)–Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Small Back Room seems positively tiny. Shot in the chiaroscuro black-and-whites of film noir and restricted, until its climax, to a series of small, relatively claustrophobic rooms in wartime London, it is the visual and thematic antithesis of the Archers’ most beloved films from the 1940s. With its focus on psychological distress, physical ailment, and desperate relationships, we can see the film as the gateway to the path that would lead Powell into directing Peeping Tom (1960), his now celebrated but then reviled portrait of a murderous psychopath.

The Small Back Room (1949) [The Criterion Collection #441 - Out Of Print] [Re-UP]

Based on the novel by Nigel Balchin, The Small Back Room takes place in London in 1943, a literally dark time of constant blackouts and bomb raids. The Germans have started dropping booby-trapped bombs into the English countryside where the primary victims are children, and the military turns to Sammy Rice (David Farrar), a research scientist whose expertise is in bomb disposal. However, Sammy is also a bitter and cynical alcoholic who is only barely hanging on to his life (when we first meet him, he is in a pub, and despite the movie-star close-up that Farrar gets upon his introduction, we quickly sense just how despondent he is). Sammy’s psychological damage is externalized via a missing leg, which has been replaced with a “tin leg” that is constantly causing him pain that neither doctor-prescribed “dope” nor alcohol can fully soothe. His constant kicking at the painful prosthetic appendage is a visual reminder that he is never at ease.

The Small Back Room (1949) [The Criterion Collection #441 - Out Of Print] [Re-UP]

While Sammy frequently turns to the bottle for solace, his real lifeline is Susan (Kathleen Byron), the secretary for the military unit in which he works. They have a romantic relationship that is complicated both personally and professional. While Susan technically lives across the hall from Sammy’s flat, they are always sharing the same space (in Balchin’s novel, they live together, but British censorship at the time couldn’t allow such living in sin on the big screen). Susan is kind and loving and, most importantly, patient, an absolute requirement for dealing with someone like Sammy, who is constantly on the edge. The exact nature of Sammy’s problems (and how he lost that leg) is never made clear, although the ambiguity adds to his intrinsic fascination; if everything about him were to be explained, he might just be a sadsack, with all sense of mystery lost.

The Small Back Room (1949) [The Criterion Collection #441 - Out Of Print] [Re-UP]

Much of The Small Back Room operates on the interpersonal level, alternating between Sammy and Susan’s complex romantic travails and Sammy’s work with his military unit. Although bitter and angry, Sammy is also brutally honest, which we see in a subplot involving a flawed machine gun his unit is trying to foist on the military brass. When Sammy realizes that using such an ineffective gun might cost human lives, he can’t help but disagree with his superiors. You might describe Sammy as brave, but his bravery comes from the same pit of nothing to lose from which traditional film noir protagonists draw their muster. This is crucial when the film builds to its climax, which breaks from all the dark, claustrophobic interiors into the scalding sunshine of a beach where one of the German booby-trapped bombs has been discovered. Knowing that one expert has already met his demise trying to dismantle one, Sammy sets about trying to defuse the weapon in a crackerjack 17-minute sequence that would have made Hitchcock proud. Without recourse to suspenseful music, Powell and Pressburger deliver a nail-biting scenario scored to the sound of wind and surf that at any moment could spell disaster.

The Small Back Room (1949) [The Criterion Collection #441 - Out Of Print] [Re-UP]

As good as this final sequence is, other parts of The Small Back Room don’t work quite as well. Although the film was a clearly self-conscious detour toward realism for Powell and Pressburger, they couldn’t help but add at least one fantastical flourish in the form of a fevered dream sequence in which Sammy, trying to fight off his alcoholic demons and under the misperception that Susan has left him, imagines himself in a surreal dreamworld of ticking clocks and a gigantic whiskey bottle. It’s not that visualizing Sammy’s internal turmoil is an inherently bad idea, but the literalism of the sequence makes it very nearly absurd when it should be emotionally traumatic. Thankfully, this interlude is a brief misstep in an otherwise fine film. Despite its being considered a “minor” Powell and Pressburger film, The Small Back Room works because it takes advantage of its smaller scope, focusing us inward on a character who is instantly memorable even as he draws on so many familiar movie characters who have populated dark alleys and dim offices, brooding over their losses and failures.
QNetwork
The Small Back Room (1949) [The Criterion Collection #441 - Out Of Print] [Re-UP]

Special Features:
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer
- Audio commentary featuring film scholar Charles Barr
- New video interview with cinematographer Christopher Challis
- Excerpts from Michael Powell’s audio dictations for his autobiography
- PLUS: A new essay by film critic Nick James

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