Rent The Small Back Room (1949)

Gripping - The Small Back Room review by sb

FILM & REVIEW Really unusual wartime drama from Powell and Pressburger. The Germans are dropping booby trapped bombs that don’t explode on impact but only if they are handled. Several children have been killed this way and Captain Stuart (Gough) is tasked with recruiting scientist Sammy Rice (Farrar) to investigate . He is a embittered man with a artificial foot that causes him considerable pain that the pills don’t help but whiskey does. - but he becomes out of control on the stuff. He is involved with Susan (Byron) who puts up with his surly moods as she is in love with him but he doesn’t make it easy. He also fights bureaucracy and the military and chafes under the leadership of Jack Hawkins. Meanwhile more bombs are discovered so they need so find one before it blows up. It’s got a very strange feel to it….Powell has said that a lot of the lighting and camera angles came from German Expressionism and a lot of the dialogue from minor characters seems almost deliberately stilted. Farrar is just superb in the tortured role with Byron matching him in intensity with a superb whiskey influenced surreal dream sequence which is quite remarkable and an edge of the seat bomb disposal sequence towards the end which is as good as I’ve seen. Add in Sid James and Robert Morley as the comic relief and you have an overlooked gem - 4/5

Hidden War. - The Small Back Room review by Steve

Ultra-realistic, and harrowing adaptation of Nigel Balchin's novel which explores the mental trauma of those working in research and development during WWII. The boffins. David Farrar plays a bomb specialist who leads a group of scientists working in munitions. They are a small department which has to fight for resources and status.

This is an entirely masculine environment. And all the men live with extreme stress. Farrar lost a foot in an explosion, and incessantly fights off the whisky that brings him oblivion, while being called out to investigate the German trick bomb which has been killing his colleagues. His partner (Kathleen Byron) is his unofficial therapist.

The men suppress their emotions and have no way of communicating their fears. Farrer needs to determine the mental state of one of his team, but is only able to hold a short discussion on detonators. There is sense that there is no way of knowing how broken these people are because their customs are entirely based around not showing how they feel.

It is a dry, procedural film which manages to be intense and disturbing. Byron's emotional aura has an strange, mystical power. And it must be Farrar's best performance. The extreme expressionism of the photography might be overwrought if Powell and Pressburger had not created such an authentic hell, in a film of extreme psychological close ups.