HOUR OF GLORY (THE SMALL BACK ROOM) B/W 106m dirs: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
w/David Farrar, Jack Hawkins, Kathleen Byron, Leslie Banks, Michael Gough, Cyril Cusack, Milton Rosmer, Walter Fitzgerald, Emrys Jones, Michael Goodliffe, Renée Asherson, Anthony Bushell, Henry Caine, Elwyn Brook-Jones, James Dale, Sam Kydd, June Elvin, David Hutcheson, Sidney James, Roderick Lovell, James Carney, Roddy Hughes, Geoffrey Keen, Bryan Forbes, Robert Morley
From the Turner Classic Movies website (www.tcm.com), this article about the film by Sean Axmaker: "The British filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, longtime collaborators who jointly signed their films under the name The Archers, should have been at the top of the industry after completing The Red Shoes (1948). The glorious Technicolor epic of dance, music, art, and passion went on to win two Oscars and was voted one of the greatest British films of all time in a 1998 poll, but in 1948 The Rank Organization couldn't see the film's potential and decided to part ways with The Archers. Powell and Pressburger took up an offer to return to Alexander Korda's London Films, where they were promised complete artistic freedom. Their first film for Korda couldn't have been more different from the big, romantic, sweeping Technicolor films they had become famous for.
"Based on a novel by Nigel Balchin, The Small Back Room (retitled Hour of Glory in the U.S.) is wartime drama about a bitter scientist battling self-pity (he has a 'tin foot,' which he noisily knocks when it aches), alcoholism, and a disgust for the way his boss is pushing a new artillery gun on the military that is far from ready. He's one of the 'back room boys,' part of a special weapons research unit out of the public eye, and as he struggles with his eroding sense of self-worth, he's called upon by the military to help them combat insidious explosive devices dropped from German bombers that have already killed three children.
"For the roles of Sammy Rice, the handsome but self-loathing scientist, and his lover Susan, who is also the secretary of his boss, they cast David Farrar and Kathleen Byron, both stars of the earlier Black Narcissus (1947). The two suggest an intimacy that the film can't directly acknowledge. Jack Hawkins, a respected stage actor on his way to becoming a major British movie star, was cast as Sammy's glad-handing boss, a charismatic, forceful salesman to Sammy's serious man of science, Michael Gough (who went on to play Alfred the Butler in four Batman films) is the British officer who recruits Sammy to help him with the booby-trapped bombs, and Cyril Cusack made his first of many appearances as an Archers regular as the stuttering fuse expert. The stutter was Cusack's idea, which Powell immediately embraced, along with the actor himself. Future director Bryan Forbes made his screen debut as a soldier mortally wounded by one of the insidious bombs.
"Though they shared billing on screen, Powell and Pressburger divided their duties: Powell was the director, Pressburger the screenwriter, and they shared producing duties. Powell directs in a more realistic style than films like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, creating a wartime London drenched in shadows with crowded nightclubs, and cramped apartments: A World War II noir where the enemy is within. But his use of distinctive locations (a gun test set against the backdrop of Stonehenge, for instance) gives the film a visual dynamism, and for one sequence he delves into overtly expressionist images to suggest the psychological state of Sammy as he waits for Susan to return. As the clock ticks and his mind drifts to the unopened bottle of whisky on the table--kept in plain sight to remind himself of his weakness--the rest of the room falls away as both the clock and the bottle become larger and larger, eventually dwarfing him on the screen as the ticking takes over the soundtrack. The effects were created entirely on the set, with props and models constructed by Hein Heckroth and slashes of theatrical lighting devised by cinematographer Christopher Challis to accentuate and isolate details. For some effects, Challis used a split screen to create even greater contrasts. It's a striking and imaginative sequence that ranks with Salvador Dali's work on Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) as a creative approach to visualizing interior struggles.
"For the climax, where Sammy is called to defuse one of the German booby traps found intact on a beach, Powell takes a far more realistic approach, creating tension through crisp cutting and composition. 'I think that was one of the most marvelous sequences ever,' remarked cinematographer Christopher Challis in an interview years later. 'Now that was entirely Micky [Michael Powell] - the idea of getting closer and closer as the sequence became more tense until you ended up with just fingernails and eyes and bits of bomb screws.' In the novel, the scene played out on a familiar sandy beach but Powell saw the dramatic possibilities of the pebble beach at Chesil Bank, as he wrote in his autobiography: 'I saw at once the great curve of the Chesil Bank, the waves listlessly breaking on the beach and grinding the pebbles as the undertow retreated, the sinister shape of the bomb, upright in the pebbles like a giant Thermos flask, the bank itself, where every footstep sent a thousand pebbles rolling.' It adds a volatile dimension to an already tense situation.
"The film was well reviewed (News of the World called it 'Magnificent picture making') but poorly attended, which Powell attributed to the public's exhaustion with the war. 'The setting was wartime London and everyone had had enough of that, which I might have suspected had I not been such a fervent admirer of Nigel's book.' Powell's more vivacious and flamboyant--emotionally and visually--films are more famous than the intimate and intense The Small Back Room but it remains a powerful drama and a provocative mix of war drama and film noir.
"Sources:
"Arrows of Desire, Ian Christie. Faber and Faber, 1994.
"'On The Small Back Room,'" Raymond Durgnat. Powell, Pressburger and Others, ed. Ian Christie, BFI, 1978.
"Michael Powell, James Howard. Butler and Tanner, 1996.
"Million Dollar Movie, Michael Powell. Random House, 1992.
"IMDb"
From Have You Seen ...? by David Thomson: "This is a war film, and a film noir; it's even a story about a man struggling to overcome the twin handicaps of self-pity and booze. And such familiar genres are not common in Powell and Pressburger films, which had little taste for slices of ordinary life. Sammy Rice's life is not commonplace, but it's very real: He has to lie on the shifting pebbles of an English beach, trying to dismantle a bomb or a mine such as the Germans have not used before, and describing what he is doing over the radio-telephone in case he blows himself up.
"Sammy limps. He has been wounded before, badly enough to have a tin foot. He despises the bureaucracy that endangers his work, and his fear of being under such pressure has driven him to drink and to the certainty that he is unlovable. Of course, there is a girl, but she has to ignore his gloom and his insults.
"This comes from a Nigel Balchin novel, and Balchin helped the Archers with the screenplay --- Michael Powell would compare his dialogue to that of Pinter, and in the dark and terse love scenes between David Farrar and Kathleen Byron there is a note of Hawks sometimes, of desperate fatalism. And of a need that voices itself as a challenge. Sammy's problem with life is also beautifully mirrored in the form of a Corporal Taylor (Cyril Cusack), an expert with lethal fuses, but a man haunted by the infidelities of his wife. He has been reduced to a dire stammer, and Sammy's tin leg squeaks against the pebbles as he struggles to make sense of a bomb --- Powell rejected the idea of a sandy shore and filmed at Chesil Beach. He wanted those pebbles in a film where sound is crucial and excruciating.
"There are also nightmares where Sammy's small back room is nearly crowded out by a monstrous whiskey bottle --- these scenes are very impressive, yet in truth they work against the realist tension of the rest of the film and the restraint in Farrar's performance. The bottle is one of those things where Powell goes too far and looks arty because of it.
"The picture was made for Alexander Korda, with Christopher Challis doing the black-and-white photography. Hein Heckroth as the production designer, Brian Easdale writing the music (there's a jazz club sequence, too, with Ted Heath and Kenny Baker), and Reginald Mills as the editor. Farrar is one of those actors let go by the British film industry, and he is very powerful here, just as Kathleen Byron had clearly become a Powell muse. ('She was too straight to be an actress,' Powell would write. 'But she was a good one.') The film was a failure (were war films going out of style, or is it too dark and personal?). To that extent, it's a badly neglected film in the Powell-Pressburger collection, and it has fine supporting performances from Jack Hawkins, Leslie Banks, Michael Gough, Milton Rosmer, Emrys Jones, Michael Goodliffe, Renée Asherson, Anthony Bushell, Sidney James, and Robert Morley as 'the Minister.'"