The Small Back Room

I'm continuing my mini- "Brit Noir" festival with 1949's The Small Back Room, directed by the acclaimed pair Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It was the follow-up to The Red Shoes, one of the gaudiest exhibitions of color in cinema history, but this one is steeped in chiaroscuro.

Lit like a noir film, The Small Back Room is instead a character study set against the backdrop of World War II. It is 1943, and the British are observing blackouts and prepared for bombing raids by the Germans. We instantly get the feel of Brittania by little language things, such as the Germans being referred to as "Jerry" and a sign reading "All Passes Must Be Shewn."

The back room of the title is an office tucked away where diligent scientists develop new weapons systems. A stalwart young captain (Michael Gough, who would play Alfred the butler of Wayne Manor many years later) needs expert assistance with some booby-trapped canisters the Germans are dropping on the British countryside. He's put onto David Farrar, a brilliant but troubled expert on demolition. He has an artificial leg which causes him constant pain. He takes pills for it, but would rather drink whisky. He has a long-suffering girlfriend, Kathleen Byron, who finally has enough of his self-pitying.

This is a somewhat intriguing picture that is heavy on style, which covers a somewhat weak and trite story. Powell and Pressburger pull out all the stops, using the camera brilliantly in composition and form. Every scene has something going on--whether it's the use of sound (a meeting involving the decision whether to go forward with a new gun is interrupted by jackhammering from the street outside) or the use of deep focus. When Farrar is at home, a bottle of whisky he's saving for V-Day looms in the foreground like a monolith. In the middle of the picture we get a highly expressionistic scene in which Farrar, waiting for a late Byron, stares at the bottle, the ticking of a clock getting louder and louder. Eventually he hallucinates that the bottle is about ten feet tall. It's like the Salvador Dali dream sequence in Spellbound.

The film ends excellently, with a white-knuckle scene in which Farrar attempts to defuse one of those pesky German booby-traps while it's nestled in the pebbles of Chesil Beach. The photography, editing, and acting all make this scene as suspenseful as possible.