FILM CLUB - The Small Back Room

Powell & Pressburger Season - 1949

On the surface at least, the film is about a group of misfit boffins. Part of a scientific back room where ideas that may or may not have military application are tested and analysed. They also have practical duties to assess new weapons, defuse booby trap bombs, anything militarily a bit out of the usual. 

The unit is approached by Sgt Taylor ( Micheal Gough ) about a new unknown style of bomb that's already killed three children. The unit head Prof Mair ( Milton Rosmer ) points them towards the intellectual brains behind bomb defusion Sammy Rice ( David Farrar) He has a false metal leg that is giving him constant pain, that indicates he has a past that has trauma within it. An extremely capable man who is broken, but kept together by the love for his work, and the love of others.

He's having a long standing affair with Sue ( Kathleen Byron ) the unit's secretary. She consistently prevents Sammy from falling completely off the rails. When she becomes exasperated with him, after confronting Sammy about his lack of career ambition, he starts to fall apart. Just as he has an extremely tricky diffusion of this new style bomb to execute.

The Small Back Room followed three of The Archer's very finest full Technicolour movies - A Matter of Life & Death - The Red Shoes - Black Narcissus.  David Farrar and Kathleen Byron both starred in the latter, and were frequent members of The Archer's pool of actors. In comparison to its predecessors The Small Back Room, could seem a much smaller scale movie, but it does not lack for ambition. Like many P&P movies it teeters close to the edge of imaginative overkill, but somehow manages to pull it off.

Filmed in black and white this is probably Powell and Pressburger's most bleakly noir and clearly expressionist film, all large dramatic shadows, acute diagonal camera angles and lit faces looming out of the pitch black. It also contains the famous 'paranoia nightmare ' sequence when Sammy begins to lose control of his mind. 

One striking scene is from after Sue has left him. A picture frame, emptied of her photograph, now all you can see is Sammy's reflection cutting across the empty space in the frame. This film is a master class in how to harness cinematography and sound to convey mood and unbalanced states of mind. For The Small Back Room is also a title that describes a place in Sammy's mind, where he tries to contain his self loathing in order to not completely lose it. Occasionally escaping its self imposed confinement.

There is a very affecting performance from The Archers stalwart Cyril Cusack as a back room boy with a nervous stutter, whose home life is teetering on the edge of collapse. Giving the sense that the work they all do in 'the small back room' comes at a cost to them personally and their wider relationships. Add in distinct cameo performances from the likes of Jack Hawkins, Sid James and Robert Morley and you have a really involving chamber piece, some of which is stylistically, psychologically and thematically way way ahead of its time. After this film, the quality of The Archer's output noticeably declines, with only occasional flurries when the old creative flair and daring return.

CARROT REVIEW- 7/8