The Small Back Room [Hour of Glory] **** (1949, David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Jack Hawkins, Leslie Banks) – Classic Movie Review 5502

Writer-producer-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1949 film thriller is an intricate and intimate version of the excellent 1943 Nigel Balchin novel about a broken-down, embittered World War Two British bomb expert scientist and his battle to get off the alcohol and back on the rails.

It is a very well crafted, often imaginative film, and the story and characters involve. But, with necessarily dour, downbeat lead performances by David Farrar as wartime ace bomb disposal officer Sam Rice and Kathleen Byron as his girlfriend Susan, it is a muted, gloomy, now dated piece of film-making.

Sam working with a specialist back room team in London. He finds comfort in whisky and pills after being badly injured and is in constant pain from his artificial foot. But, when the Germans drop a new type of explosive booby trapped bombs on Britain in 1943, he finds he has to battle the bottle and test his nerve and resolution to disarm them.

Powell and Pressburger are perhaps not seen quite at their best with such realist material. But it is still a lovingly honed, extremely conscientious piece of work. The best sequence by far is the uber-tense climatic dismantling of the bomb on Portland Bill.

Also in the cast are Jack Hawkins, Leslie Banks, Michael Gough, Robert Morley, Cyril Cusack, Anthony Bushell, Renée Asherson, Milton Rosmer, Walter Fitzgerald, Emrys Jones, Michael Goodliffe, Elwyn Brook-Jones, Sam Kydd, Sidney James, Geoffrey Keen, James Dale, Henry Caine and Bryan Forbes.

Technically, as expected, it is impeccable. It is shot in black and white by Christopher Challis, scored by Brian Easdale and set designed by Hein Heckroth.

It was belatedly released in America as Hour of Glory in 1952.

It was filmed at Denham, Worton Hall and Shepperton film studios, with location shooting at Chesil Bank and St Catherine’s Chapel in Dorset, Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, and on London’s Victoria Embankment.

Nigel Balchin (3 December 1908 – 17 May 1970).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5502

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