Robert Hamer (1947)

In fact, a single rainy Sunday in Whitechapel – the action takes place in the course of that one day, give or take a couple of flashbacks.  This is an unusual, interesting film.  What makes it so is the unresolved tension between what look to be Robert Hamer’s two main aims.  He tries, with a good deal of success, to convey the ingrained boredom of the lives being described – but, at the same time, how much the characters’ preoccupations matter to them.  Hamer also wants to make a suspenseful crime melodrama.  The split personality of the piece is epitomised by the two types of criminal in the mix:  a trio of petty crooks (Alfie Bass, John Carol, Jimmy Hanley) whose inept efforts to make crime pay are played mostly for laughs; and a tall, handsome escaped criminal called Tom Swann (John McCallum).  His ex-girlfriend Rose (Googie Withers), now the dissatisfied wife of a much older man (Edward Chapman) and the loathed stepmother of his two daughters (Patricia Plunkett and Susan Shaw), hides Tom in the spare bedroom when he comes looking for refuge.  This (central) strand of the story is deadly serious; the climactic sequence, after night has fallen, in which the police chase Tom down through a railway yard, and he and they jump into and out of trains etc is meant to be purely exciting.  It nearly is: the deeply shadowed lighting (by Douglas Slocombe) is impressive and the editing (Michael Truman) no less so.  The chase is well enough staged to make you forget for the moment that the police are bound to succeed, that it’s de rigueur in a commercial British film of the time for crime to be punished.  Yet the sequence is eclipsed by the tragedy of Rose Sandigate’s ennui and unrequited love.  Georges Auric’s score reaches a climax along with the police pursuit of Tom.  It was the music that made me more aware that my thoughts were elsewhere – with Rose, back in the house that she thinks of as a prison and where Tom has abandoned her.

It’s soon clear that Tom is a heartless user and John McCallum, on the evidence of this film anyway, isn’t much of an actor.  It’s not easy therefore to get interested in the character – but you do, because of what he means to Rose.  Googie Withers deserves most of the credit for this.  She has many fine moments (I especially liked Rose’s expression of relief when her husband George decides to go out to the pub) and she’s extraordinarily good in the last part of the film, when Tom has left Rose behind.  He showed the limits of his feelings for her with a right hook; she now faces prison for harbouring him.  She takes the practical actions needed to end her life – she locks the doors, turns on the gas oven – and Withers’ automatic movements give the scene real power.  (The subsequent shots of Rose recovering consciousness in a hospital bed don’t make emotional sense.   This coda seems tacked on to make the audience feel better; in fact, our identification with Rose is such that you feel rather her distress at having failed to die.)   Googie Withers is less impressive when Hamer showcases her acting:  there are moments when the film around her seems to stop as she prepares to deliver a big dramatic moment.  She’s undoubtedly the heart of the movie, though.   It Always Rains on Sunday, adapted by Hamer, Angus MacPhail and Henry Cornelius from a novel by Arthur La Bern, is well acted within the conventions of British cinema of the 1940s.  Those conventions mean, among other things, that several characters sound too genteel; but the best people break free of the conventions.  They include Gladys Henson and Sydney Tafler (excellent as a philandering store owner-cum-small-time musician) and, more strikingly, Edward Chapman.  He is best remembered, I guess, as a support in Norman Wisdom films but here he creates a sensitive, rounded portrait of George Sandigate, a thoroughly decent and, to his wife, stultifying man.  David Lines is excellent as the young teenager Alfie, the one child of the Sandigates’ marriage.  For someone of my generation, decades of Dixon of Dock Green cast a long shadow over the presence of Jack Warner as the main policeman.

1 November 2012