Review of The Small Back Room – revolutionary war drama by Powell and Pressburger | Movies

Kathleen Byron and David Farrar were unforgettable presences in Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 classic, Black Narcissus, as a hysterical nun and the taciturn colonial agent with whom she is madly in love. The filmmakers reunited these remarkable performers two years later for this intimate and intense war drama thriller; brilliant on emotional misery, low-level fear, and the petty office politics of wartime government. The action takes place mainly in the darkness and rain of London, except for the sensational final sequence in the bright sunshine of Chesil Beach, Dorset.

Adapted from an autobiographical novel by military scientist Nigel Balchin, The Small Back Room is a work that shows the filmmakers pushing – brilliantly – the conventions and constraints of a classic wartime drama. Many British directors might have wanted to take on this story. But the flourishes of Powell and Pressburger are irresistible.

Farrar plays a role not so far removed from his brooding, sullen Mr Dean in Black Narcissus. He is Sammy, a civilian scientist, or back-room “boffin”, working for Professor Mair (Milton Rosmer) in 1943 in an ad hoc research department set up by the War Office. Sammy is depressed and an alcoholic, driven to despair by the incessant pain of a prosthetic foot which, out of vanity and stubbornness, he refuses to remove in the presence of his girlfriend, Susan, his boss’s secretary, played radiantly by Byron .

In truth, it’s not as interesting a role for Byron, who is filmed and lit more softly and gently than in Black Narcissus, but she brings warmth to a saintly role. Susan lives next door to Sammy, and part of the poignancy of her refusal to remove the false foot is the implication that, for all their quasi-domestic intimacy, they may not yet have slept together – or they did, the experience was as strained as everything else in their relationship. Granted, office politics mean they can’t openly acknowledge that they’re together.

The story begins when a friendly young officer, Captain Stuart (Michael Gough), asks Sammy for his help in finding ways to disable the sinister new booby-trapped devices that the Nazis are dropping during their air raids. And it is in this quest that the subtle and brilliant tension of the film lies: how did Sammy lose his footing? Nobody ever says it. But by the end of the story, the answer is pretty clear. Far from being a behind-the-scenes boy, Sammy is a courageous man of action. He may have lost his nerve, but not his courage.

The clarity and urgency of the military mission is opposed by a whirlwind of pettiness and intrigue, a series of insidious problems as dangerous but as harmless as the Germans’ nasty little unexploded bombs. Sammy hates the official in charge, R.B. Waring (Jack Hawkins), a time server who is trying to push through a new type of artillery in the face of military skepticism and Sammy’s own research indicating the weapon is ineffective. Professor Mair’s own position depends on the continued existence of a certain pompous War Office minister (Robert Morley), whose imminent dismissal could herald a top-down personnel change. Sammy is too grumpy and self-pitying to fight for the existence of his department, or even to fight for the top job himself.

It all comes to a head in an extraordinary sequence in a committee room in which top brass and civil servants have a bad-tempered discussion in the presence of a framed photograph of Winston Churchill, the statesman who, of course, tried to sabotage, on a patriotic level. grounds, Powell and Pressburger’s satire The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The miserably formal and conceited waffle is almost inaudible against the backdrop of drilling and construction work taking place outside. We absorb the incompetence and absurdity of it all as the camera follows the muffled faces. It’s an almost surreal scene – although the truly surreal moment, perhaps inspired by Hitchcock’s Spellbound or Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, comes when Sammy is on the verge of depression trying to resist the lure of whiskey.

The final scene is notable for a striking new character: an ATS corporal (Renée Asherson), brave, frank and kittenishly handsome, who must relay on a radio headset all of Sammy’s good-natured comments as he s crouched alone on the beach, defusing a bomb. . This is a character to be compared to Kim Hunter’s US Air Force radio operator speaking to David Niven at the beginning of A Matter of Life and Death. The strength and confidence in Powell and Pressburger’s filmmaking is a pleasure – as is their distinctive love of adventure and romance.

• The Small Back Room is available on digital, DVD and Blu-ray platforms starting June 3.