{"id":283786,"date":"2024-06-27T00:00:12","date_gmt":"2024-06-27T05:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/filmobsessive.com\/?p=283786"},"modified":"2024-06-26T11:35:23","modified_gmt":"2024-06-26T16:35:23","slug":"powell-pressburgers-the-small-back-room-gets-a-renovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/filmobsessive.com\/film\/new-releases\/powell-pressburgers-the-small-back-room-gets-a-renovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Powell & Pressburger’s The Small Back Room Gets a Renovation"},"content":{"rendered":"
Michael Powell, who with his co-director Emeric Pressburger was one-half of England’s greatest directing team, has claimed their 1949 wartime noir thriller The Small Back Room<\/em> as “my best film.” This from a man who can count among his work The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I’m Going!<\/em>, and others is no small boast. The Small Back Room<\/em> may be neither the most lauded nor the most notorious of “The Archers'” (as they nicknamed themselves as their production company) efforts, but a new 4K restoration and re-release from Rialto Pictures will surely cause others to reconsider whether it can stand alongside, or even above, their very best films.<\/p>\n The Small Back Room<\/em> contrasts starkly with the lush Technicolor melodramas for which the Archers were best known. Those films, especially Black Narcissus<\/em> and The Red Shoes<\/em>, lavished lurid color on their tortured protagonists, doubling down on their psychological torment with a hyperbolic mise-en-scene and high-stakes cliffhangers (in Black Narcissus<\/em>, more than a little literally so!). By comparison, The Small Back Room<\/em> is positively understated, focusing on the everyday functions of the men and women who worked far from the front in support of the British war effort.<\/p>\n It’s the Spring of 1943 and bomb disposal expert Sammy Rice (David Farrar) is consigned to a back office job in the Ministry of Defence. His aching tin foot is probably one reason; his love of drink might well be another. Still, he’s got a girl, Sue (Kathleen Byron, Farrar’s Black Narcissus<\/em> co-star, here luminous and demure), even though he suspects her love might be based on pity. The “dope” he’s been prescribed does little to assuage his physical pain, and it’s all he can do to lay off the Highland Whisky.<\/p>\n Sammy might be hobbled and he might be on the verge of alcoholism, but he’s still knowledgeable enough to be of use to the cause when the Germans appear be dropping a new antipersonnel bomb on innocent victims and unsuspecting children. He’s assigned to investigate the clever contraption, a trembler-detonated flask-shaped device that begins to preoccupy his thoughts. Worse, he starts to doubt Sue’s love, and his mental and physical state deteriorates. His empty apartment turns into nightmare fuel as he descends into a manic state and a night of terror.<\/p>\n Fortunately for the British armed forces (and humanity in general), Sammy manages to sober back up just long enough to be sent out into the field, where the fiendish devices have claimed more victims, including another disposal expert. He’ll have to muster every ounce of sober, careful expertise to defuse the units—and in doing so, earn back the trust of his superiors, advance the war effort, and like in any good midcentury war drama, win over his girl, once and for all.<\/p>\n The plot, adapted from a novel by Nigel Balchin, isn’t any great shakes, so to speak, and even Pressburger was less than enthusiastic, only agreeing reluctantly to make the film three years after Powell first pitched it. But it offers up its audience an opportunity to celebrate the work of the commoners and labor force in support of the war effort through those who toiled away in “small back rooms” across the country. And while its scope may be less epic, its mise en scene less grand than The Red Shoes<\/em> or Black Narcissus,<\/em> the kinds of films for which The Archers had already become known, it nonetheless gave the two directors room to play with the increasingly popular film noir idiom.<\/p>\n