On Chesil Beach… The Small Back Room (1949), BFI, Cinema Unbound

What I really want sir is a bit of expert guessing and some expert advice on how to handle it when we get our hand on one…

 

This is another one of those films that just has to be seen on the big screen and the BFI’s restoration-in-progress digital 4k presentation brought home every nuance and, especially, bead of sweat on David Farrar’s brow as he battled alcohol addiction in his nightmarish confrontation with a giant bottle of scotch and then struggled to retain composure in a very personal battle with a fiendish German bomb lying amongst the shifting pebbles of Chesil Beach. This confrontation between man and booby-trapped explosive has never seemed so tense, more visceral and further away from my own experience of that stretch of beach from Abbotsbury to Weymouth.

This is also a return to top quality Powell and Pressburger after three well-made and under-rated films that are all good but just not this good. We’re set up for Sammy Rice (Farrar) and this fateful meeting by a devastating cameo from Renée Asherson as an A.T.S. corporal who has to relay the doomed attempt to defuse another of the bombs by another officer, and it’s never hit me so hard as she repeats his words, his brave joking about the situation – Wembley being packed for the FA Cup final between man and bomb – before getting to his last words as he realises the bomb has an inexplicable second wire… Not only has a character we like lost their life but we relive the detail through someone else’s grief. That’s inventive and leaves the audience helpless as the next man steps up.

 

Kathleen Byron

The Small Back Room is packed with such moments; overloaded with great cameos, humour and spirit. If you don’t want to live in a world in which Sidney James runs your local pub and Kathleen Byron has your best interests at heart, then I can’t help you. This is probably David Farrar’s finest moment or jointly with Black Narcissus and in both cases that’s down to Kathleen; it takes two to tango and whilst Sammy can’t dance – not with a tin leg he can’t – the relationship between Byron’s Susan and him is the core of the film. Kathleen perseveres with Sammy not just because she can see how far he’s fallen but because she sees how far he could still rise and she’s not willing to give up on her love, not by a long chalk!

Based on the 1943 book by Nigel Balchin, a psychologist who wanted to show the inner struggles not just of addiction but also of brave men injured and worn down by the War. Sammy has lost his leg in an unsuccessful attempt at bomb disposal and this has led to constant pain, suppressed by a mixture of “dope” – codeine? – and drink. He is too proud to take his tin leg off in front of Sue and every day is a constant struggle between using the drugs or hitting the hard stuff. She is with him all the way though, as they keep a bottle of Scotch to test his mettle in his flat and, whilst she lives across the hall, she and her cat, seem more at home in Sammy’s place.

 

Robert Morley and Jack Hawkins

The film is also about the “boffins” of the small back room tasked with developing new weapons. Sammy reports into Professor Mair (Milton Rosmer) and the unit is overseen by a-low content careerist called R.B. Waring (Jack Hawkins giving it the full narcissist...). Politics abounds and nothing appears to have changed with their low-content glad-handing minister, (Robert Morley credited as "A Guest") paying a visit and having to be entertained by a made-up experiment. He has no more idea what they do than the next fop and is by no means secure in his position and this could have all kinds of unpleasant ramifications for the team.

 

The unit is involved in testing a new gun and there’s a splendid sequence at Stone Henge with Sammy watching the test as Colonel A.K. Holland (Leslie Banks, last seen by me in the Powell Quota Quickie, Fire Raisers!) not impressed with the evidence of his own eyes; on the battlefield this new gun could cost lives. There’s another set piece when the unit has to present its findings to a committee of the Minister of War, civil servants, rival scientists and the General. It’s played partly as farce with loud roadworks obscuring the details and the minister looking at paintings for the ministry during Sammy’s reading of the statistics. But then the General asks him for his opinion and, to his credit he tells it like it is even though it’ll cost him the approbation of his seniors.

 

Michael Gough and David Farrar

“I’ll… hand it over to Susan. She’s got it all worked out in the way women always have… She’ll take it and make it into what she wants…”

But Sammy is mired in his own disability and frustrates Susan’s attempts to not only count his blessings but also to exert his force of personality and expertise. In the novel he’s over-thinking everything and relying on her to provide momentum, overlooking his achievements in a pattern Balchin well recognised from his patients’ struggles with what we would now term PTSD and imposter syndrome. He’s a work in progress and that’s something seen on both paper and on screen.

Yet Sammy is sharp as a tack and compassionate with it, a natural leader of men with more moral courage than most. Even as he is so hard on himself, he shows such emotional intelligence in dealing with a nervy co-worker, Corporal Taylor (another quietly striking cameo from Cyril Cusack), who is having marital issues and doesn’t want to accept his own weaknesses at work. Sammy firstly asks his advice about trembler fuses and then coaxes him to ask for help, agreeing to his leaving early to help his wife. Beautiful interplay between the two, Farrar raising his game alongside Cusack in another of the film’s poignant moments.

David Farrar and Cyril Cusack

The film starts with Captain Dick Stuart (Michael Gough) making his way to see the unit and explaining the mysterious items that may or may not be new German bombs. Sammy Rice is your man advises Professor Mair and with Susan’s help, Stuart locates him in the pub run by "Knucksie" Moran (Sid James) who has just advised her man against drinking whiskey, he knows he can’t handle it. Back at Sammy’s flat Stuart explains the explosive enigma and Sammy’s hooked… Mair’s right about his intuiting and expertise. The two take an instant liking as does Stuart to Susan who he offers to walk home before she tells him she lives across the hall. It’s one of Gough’s best roles too.

We’re hooked too and are rooting for these three from now on. If any film shows the importance of the Archers’ combination of script and direction it’s this one, the quality doesn’t really drop throughout and the whole team is magnificent. A micro-managed masterpiece of dramatic thought on screen. I look forward to the finalised restoration from the BFI, it’s worth every second of their painstaking devotion!

You've got to make up your mind whether you want to spend your whole life being a person it's just too bad about or not...

Try harder Sammy.

Call of duty… The Small Back Room (1949)

I’ve sat many times on Chesil Beach, a Dorset oddity formed of a bank running parallel with the shore producing a long thin natural lagoon unlike anything else in Britain. The bank consists of pebbles piled deep onto the sand below: it’s hard to walk on and exhausting in the heat – the natural and perfect spot to fish for mackerel or to just surrender to the sun and the stones…

Try those same conditions with only one good foot a raging alcoholic hang-over and a mission to disarm a German mine with enough booby traps to defeat even the most sober two-footed engineer and you have the setting for the extraordinary denouement to this quietly devastating film.

You could never call Powell and Pressburger films unsubtle but The Small Back Room is probably as seemingly understated as anything they ever did during their golden stretch of the forties and early fifties. It tackles issues of disability, extra-marital relationships and alcoholism with delicacy and poise: there was no Hays code in Blighty but there were censors bred in the post-Victorian era who didn’t want to see overt co-habitation of consenting adults, near violence towards women and an heroic man reduced to “dope” and booze to cope with his weakness.

The results feel so much like a silent film with great expressionist moments and a quite superb physical performance from David Farrar as the emotionally-crippled scientist who also happens to have just one foot. He is such a masculine presence and bravely plays out his character’s weakness with sensitivity and an immaculately-remembered limp. He is more than ably supported by Kathleen Byron who plays slightly against type as his sympathetic and steadfast partner… both of them so far away from their roles in Black Narcissus.

Kathleen Byron and David Farrar

Based on a novel by Nigel Balchin with screenplay from Pressburger with the aid of Powell, The Small Back Room followed on from The Red Shoes – perhaps surprisingly but is no less concerned with nurturing love versus natural drive.

Sammy Rice (Farrar) is the brains behind a specialist team working away in the back rooms of a London ministry. He lost his leg before the war and is constantly reminded of its absence by the pain of his artificial foot. He refuses to remove the prosthetic in the company of his lover Susan (Byron) an obvious symbol that he feels like an incomplete man without it. He drinks to numb the loss and the pain of his own inadequacy.

Susan and Sammy on their Wednesday night out

Susan may see through it, but he’s punishing himself for just not being strong enough to cope with either his disability or his over-bearing masters in the ministry. He’s the lead scientist in the unit but can’t leverage this value on superiors who are mostly careerist pen pushers who wield their influence far more effectively than their talents should allow… any resemblance with the Rank Organisation is clearly deliberate: their lack of vision holds Sammy back more than his long-lost right foot…

Key signifiers in the landscape of Sammy's living room: picture, bottle and phone

Powell and Pressbuger make stunningly good use of words in this film. Where others may well show the viewer what has happened they get their characters to “tell” using their notes or third parties. A young bomb disposal expert Captain Dick Stuart (Michael Gough) arrives looking for Sammy and after locating him in his local pub goes back to his flat where he fills us all in on the story over Susan’s coffee. There’s a new German bomb which has taken the lives of a number of children as well as army officers who have failed to disarm it. We could see the deaths and the explosions but this way we are drawn into the story that we know must end in the intimacy of a close encounter, winner takes all, involving Sammy and the bomb.

...and Susan's familiar

Bomb disposal is the closest of encounters and is the battle of minds between the designer and the disposer. Later on one of the officers is killed and, again, rather than show the events, we learn in the most heart-breaking manner of the young man’s death as his Corporal (Renée Asherson who is just perfect) reads out his transcript of his encounter her voice going thick with emotion as she recalls the forensic bravery and fragile jokes of the man she clearly loved attempting and failing to outwit the enemy.

Renée Asherson's moving cameo

The film is almost perfectly paced and we know that Sammy will at some point have to face down the same opponent: whether he’ll be defeated in the same way or succumb to his own failings we genuinely don’t know and it is gripping cinema even when our heads cry out that it’s just an actor and what looks like a thermos flask…  we believe.

Before all of that we witness what Charles Barr in his commentary describes as perhaps the most complex pairing not just in an Archer’s film but in all British cinema of the period. We also see how this forms the backdrop for Sammy’s day-to-day battles as part of the expert but under-valued team that works away trying to “solve” the War in the small back room of the title.

Sammy on Salisbury Plain

Barr talks about the film’s “restrictive narrative”, one that is focused almost entirely on Sammy – hardly anything ever happens when he’s not there and there are almost no point of view shots and no sudden screen changes to other characters: everything happens with Sammy there. This adds to the focus on character all aided by the expert cinematography of  Christopher Challis.

The supporting cast is uniformly superb with Milton Rosmer as Professor Mair who runs the unit and Jack Hawkins as R.B. Waring the salesman responsible for raising their profile and getting them into trouble with the pursuit of certain technologies for convenience and profit, not necessarily effectiveness.

The team present their findings to a Whitehall committee

Such short term-ism and petty politicking is very much the British disease (then as now) and Powell and Pressburger were undoubtedly making comment based on their own experience. R.B. laments that he is tired of people who “know their job”  as if competency smothered commerciality. The director and writers certainly knew their jobs and were craftsmen of integrity in much the same way as the film’s heroes.

Cyril Cusack and Michael Gough

It is not just Sammy who saves the day but the rock-solid perceptions of his partner, the principled professional soldiers such as Stuart, Colonel A.K. Holland (Leslie Banks) and Colonel Strang (Anthony Bushell) who is with Sammy when the going really gets tough as well as the flawed but inspired engineers in his team – the stuttering Corporal Taylor (brilliant Cyril Cusack) and the dedicated Till (Michael Goodliffe). These are people whose steadfast commitment still stirs a race memory of selfless sacrifice in response to the call of unconditional duty.

The moment arrives...

Ultimately the concern is how the individual must rouse themselves to fulfill this sense of duty and not just for any sense of national pride but through personal responsibility to those we love and those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in our name.

Whether this was a message cinema-goers still wanted to hear in 1948 is open to doubt as the film struggled in spite of warm reviews. Now it stands out as another of Powell and Pressburger’s films that is almost perfectly realized. David Farrar could have gone to Hollywood but stayed to work with Powell who he described as knowing how to move the art of the talking picture forward at a time, just a decade and a half after its introduction, when there must have been some doubt.

Two extraordinary people take the tube

Powell delivered arguably more than any other British film-maker of his time and his work retains many rich textures that still unravel at their own pace.

I watched the Criterion DVD which is available either direct or from Amazon.

Sidney James

There’s also a lovely cameo from Sid James as 'Knucksie' Moran, a patient barkeeper who tries to look after Sammy – you’re reminded of just how good an actor Sid was when given the chance.

Patrick Macnee also makes a brief appearance on the committee. RIP Mr Steed