The Small Back Room (1949)

Directed and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

In 1943, the Germans are dropping booby-trapped bombs over Britain; small and looking like anything but bombs, they are a new type of danger. Unexploded-bomb experts, led by Sammy Rice (David Farrar), are rushing to find a way to defuse them. But embittered alcoholic Rice finds that his battle with the bomb is complicated by the battles he wages with his own demons.

A typically detailed movie from The Archers – Powell and Pressburger – The Small Back Room does not have quite the involvement as do other films from that prestigious team. The principal problem is not the off-putting personality of the protagonist but, rather, the amount of time devoted to his problems. In particular, there is an extended nightmare scene, perhaps indicative of addiction-withdrawal, that, while atmospheric and powerful, nonetheless seems out of place in the context of the rest of the story.

The plot that deals with the bombs is exciting and tense. There are some good scenes included, such as when a Royal Engineer captain (Michael Gough) bullies a dying man in a desperate bid for information on a bomb, and when a character’s death occurs off-screen and is treated in a casual yet affecting way by others.

The title refers to the stereotypical location of the ‘boffins’, the thinkers and planners who, for the first time in warfare, received their due in the Second World War. The title suggests that the film was intended as a tribute to ‘the back-room boys’, but it doesn’t quite succeed in that case. It might have been better had there been a more ensemble approach to the characters in the story.

The best aspects are the acting and the direction. Farrar, a performer who rose above second-string (though he was quite above second-rate) only in a few decent films, does very well in the lead. Kathleen Byron, an equally forgotten leading lady, does just as well as Rice’s girlfriend.

The cast is full of good players, the usual Archer care being taken in the small rôles as well as the large. Some of the minor parts are filled by men and women who would go on to greater fame than the principals: the previously mentioned Gough; Renée Asherson and Cyril Cusack have substantial supporting parts; Jack Hawkins plays against his later type as an oily advertising executive put in charge of a research unit; Geoffrey Keene appears as a politically-minded bureaucrat, Robert Morley as a government minister, and Sidney James as a bartender. Look very quickly for Patrick Macnee at a committee meeting. Also included is veteran actor Leslie Banks, in one of his last rôles; he is almost unrecognizable as a one-eyed colonel who, while seeming to be the Colonel Blimp type, has great common sense.

Though not one of Powell and Pressburger’s best – its smaller perspective seems manifest in its black-and-white filming, following the brilliant colour of the previous three movies created by the duo, The Small Back Room has enough draw to hold the viewer, even if the mind may wander during certain portions.