The Small Back Room
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1949)
My cinema year, which started with The Red Shoes at BFI, happens to end with a film by the same directors showing at the same venue. The Red Shoes has been the centrepiece of BFI’s latest Powell and Pressburger retrospective with an exhibition devoted to the picture, as well as multiple screenings of it. I prefer The Small Back Room, though.
The source material, Nigel Balchin’s novel of the same name, was published in 1943 – the year in which the film is set. As its production notes made clear, The Small Back Room ‘[in] its broader sense … stands for all the hundreds of research workers who gave untiring and unseen devotion to the cause of scientific progress’ as part of the war effort. The focus of the story is one particular research section, attached to a British government ministry, which occupies a small part of a large building in London’s Park Lane. The Archers’ camera, when it first enters the building, scrolls down a visitor’s guide to the assorted occupants of the place – Norwegian Merchant Seamen’s Enquiry Office, Czechoslovak Cultur [sic] Institute, American Red Cross, Free French Information Bureau, Polish Enlistment Office, etc – with accompanying multi-lingual babble on the soundtrack. All these headings are printed but the camera comes to rest on a humbly hand-written sign for ‘Professor Mair’s Research Section – First Left’. Mair (Milton Rosmer) is an unworldly academic; his polar opposite is the high-handed, careerist R B Waring (Jack Hawkins), the unit’s only non-scientist. The central character is bomb disposal expert Sammy Rice (David Farrar), doubly embittered by physical disability and the politicking between military top brass and his immediate boss Waring that repeatedly encroaches on the research team’s testing of new weaponry. Sammy is in love with Susan (Kathleen Byron), Waring’s secretary, and she with him though they keep the relationship secret. Sammy’s artificial leg gives him almost constant pain and makes him feel unworthy of Susan. Outside office hours, he subsists on a diet of painkillers and alcohol. He drowns his sorrows whenever he can though he tries to keep off whisky – the demon drink as far as Sammy’s concerned.
With one notable, extended exception in the climax to The Small Back Room, nearly the whole film takes place indoors. Not just the title location in the bowels of ‘Park Lane House’: there are numerous scenes in Sammy’s flat; a key sequence in a committee room; another in a night club, where Susan finally loses patience with Sammy’s defeatism, and walks out on him. Even when the action moves outside to Salisbury Plain, where military exercises are taking place, the crucial part of this section – an interview with a young field gunner (Bryan Forbes in his first screen role) mortally wounded by a German explosive device he unluckily came upon – takes place under tent canvas. Christopher Challis’s camerawork invests interiors with more than just claustrophobia: the close-range shots and the lighting (not to mention the resident cat), sometimes give Sammy’s flat the feel of a snug refuge – until, that is, the bottle of Scotch that’s a constant in the décor there is opened and transforms the space into a domestic battlefield. Before that happens, his agonies of alcoholic temptation are expressed in a nightmare vision of hugely magnified, multiplying images of the whisky bottle. That surrealist flourish is certainly spectacular but visually uncharacteristic of a film whose concentrated drama is achieved through less flamboyant means.
David Farrar’s performance is aligned with, and contributes powerfully to, this quality of The Small Back Room. Among the most naturally charismatic British actors of his generation, Farrar uses his strong face to compel attention but resists grandstanding. His interiorisation of Sammy Rice’s resentful anguish increases suspense in ways both major and minor. It’s part of what makes the hero’s climactic defusing of a German booby-trapped bomb on Chesil Beach in Dorset so extraordinarily gripping. It’s also present in small details like Sammy’s pensively rubbing his chin: the rasp of bristle registers as a subtle sign of tension. Like Farrar, Kathleen Byron’s face was her cinematic fortune. As Susan, Byron is not only beautiful but emotionally convincing whenever her character is – as she often is – disguising her true feelings; she’s less effective when Susan gives vent to her exasperation with Sammy. In the supporting cast, Cyril Cusack, almost needless to say, is outstanding. Corporal Taylor – Professor Mair’s ‘star pupil with fuses’ whose long working hours give his flighty wife extra time to misbehave and distress her self-effacing husband – isn’t a large role in terms of screen time but Cusack’s characterisation is rich and affecting. The many other familiar faces in the cast include, to name just a few: super-dependable Michael Gough (as the army captain who works closely with Rice); Leslie Banks (a colonel, sporting an astonishing moustache); Renee Asherson (an ATS corporal who plays an important part in the Chesil Beach episode); Sid James (a pub landlord); and Robert Morley (a cameo appearance as a clueless, bonhomous government minister).
The three-pronged upbeat ending comes as a surprise that’s very welcome – testimony to how credibly pessimistic the film mostly is. His success on Chesil Beach paves the way for a leap in Sammy’s self-esteem, his acceptance of an invitation to take over as head of the army’s new scientific research unit, and reconciliation with Susan. The earlier committee meeting which debates the pros and cons of a new type of gun serves also as an illustration of some of the Archers’ strengths and relative weaknesses. The background details – the committee’s discussion in continued competition with the noise of drilling in the street outside, the drawing of blackout curtains – are excellent; the asides and supposedly covert glances exchanged by disputing figures around the table are too emphatic. This is one of several instances in The Small Back Room where the prevailing style comes across as a slightly uneasy suppression of Powell and Pressburger’s natural film-making modus operandi. Yet this relatively introverted piece is also one of their most satisfying dramas.
30 December 2023