Stop playing with figures, my boy. Learn something about soldiering.I haven't read extensively from whatever critical scholarship The Small Back Room has generated, but from just a bit of poking around on the internet, it seems like most viewers don't make as much of the complementary contrasts between this film and its immediate predecessor, The Red Shoes, among the works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, aka the Archers. I mean, there is the obvious difference, noted right on the back of the Criterion DVD case, that The Small Back Room was shot in black and white whereas The Red Shoes contains some of the most splendid Technicolor sequences ever created. But more fundamentally, it seems to me, the two films play off of each other almost like polar opposites in some ways. I could easily divide their attributes as antithetical pairs; in fact, I will!
The Small Back Room = science, technology, weapons, politics, masculinity, emotional repression, fear, angst, claustrophobia, sparse, behind the scenes.
The Red Shoes = art, dance, creativity, show business, femininity, emotional expression, love, loyalty, exploration, extravagant, public performance.
You'll have to mentally arrange the terms in columns since I can't format this blog to do that for you... but you get the point. I can't say at all that the Archers consciously mapped the movies out that way. They appear to have just produced the stories that were both interesting and financially viable for them at the time, and they'd spent a few years batting around the idea of basing a film on this wartime novel. The book cover, by the way, is pictured above, using a movie still as its illustration. This is a film so obscure that I could not find a single reproduction of an original film poster anywhere on line! Not even under it's alternative American-release name "Hour of Glory." Which genuinely surprises me since the Archers seem to have developed a loyal (and deserved) following. I guess this film just didn't register over the long haul quite as much as some of their more opulent, cheery and accessible productions.
So even though I was mostly a novice to the Archers films before starting this series in January 2009, I'd still seen a couple of their films (Black Narcissus, 49th Parallel) and heard enough about others (The Red Shoes and A Canterbury Tale) to recognize that they had something special going on. Still, The Small Back Room really didn't seem to register much with anyone that I'd read, and when the DVD was released (not so long ago, by the time that I was paying attention to all the new Criterion issues) I don't recall much hoopla or celebration that this film had, at long last, been made available to American viewers. It simply seemed to take its place on the Criterion shelf, more of a niche-filler for Powell & Pressburger completists than anything else.
But I think it's better than just that.
I don't think The Small Back Room can be convincingly argued as a "superior" film to the other Archers titles I've already listed, but for many guys my age, it will probably prove to be more resonant with their experience than, say, the high society theatrical milieu of The Red Shoes, or the military high command of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, two major titles in that oeuvre. Like many of their films, The Small Back Room is set in wartime England, and it shares a very similar specificity in time - spring 1943 - with another WWII British flick reviewed here awhile back, Green for Danger. Those were dark days for England, with the war's outcome genuinely uncertain and an already harried populace having to deal with an increasingly random and nihilistic onslaught from German airborne missiles. The dramatic setting has to do with a rash of booby-trap bombs that have recently exploded, killing children and others who innocently pick up the containers, curious to know what's inside. A Capt. Stuart has been commissioned to find someone able to figure out how to safely dismantle the bombs, once they can find one that hadn't already been detonated.
Stuart's search leads him to Sammy Rice, one of the "back room boys" (basically, engineers, technicians or in Brit slang, "boffins" who make stuff, run tests, fix gadgets and crunch the numbers) for an independent research team run by an old scientist, Professor Mair. Rice, middle-aged and handsome in a Fred MacMurray kind of way, really isn't as much of a "boy" as some of the others on his team, but he's not exactly a stable role model either. Brilliant in terms of technical knowledge, he's also wrestling with his demons. An unspecified trauma, presumably a war injury, has cost him his right foot, and he's wavering between prescribed pain-killers and Scotch whiskey as his preferred medication of choice, whiskey being the more volatile and dangerous of the two as far as its effect on the man. And in the depths of his self-pity and accompanying self-recriminations for being such a wretch, Sammy quickly loses perspective and drags the only person really close to him down into the slough with him - Susan, who happens to be the secretary for Mair's research team, and a woman who lives "just across the hall" from his apartment (since the movies weren't quite ready to have adult men and women cohabitating on screen in 1949, or for some years to come.)
On top of Sammy's personal struggles, he also finds himself unpleasantly scrunched in the midst of some military-industrial-political intrigues, as his research team has been hired to submit an evaluation on a new artillery cannon to be purchased by the British army. Sammy's visit to a test firing session that takes place, astonishingly, at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, raises suspicions that the gun is basically unreliable junk, but of course that's hardly a strong enough verdict to wipe out lucrative defense contracts. And a too blatant disruption of business-as-usual could have a devastating effect on the team, dependent as they are on remaining in the good graces of favorably disposed politicians and appointees. Sammy, of course, has no time or patience for all this and would like nothing more than to just swat the smarmy connivers away like so many gnats, so that he could focus on his research and figure out how to get his love life back on track. But the distractions just don't stop. And now Susan is starting to press him to get over his mopeyness and do something to fill the leadership void she sees coming when old Prof. Mair is finally put out to pasture.
Dramatic tensions build as the conflict with Susan comes to a head - and his resistance to the call of a whiskey bottle on his desk (sealed and set aside for V-Day when England finally wins its bloody war) finally erodes. What follows is a fantastic, mildly surrealist scene, not exactly a dream sequence but close enough to qualify, said to be influenced by a similar passage in Hitchcock's Spellbound, in which Sammy comes just this close to the snapping point in working through his dreadful fascination with that damned bottle (or more precisely, what it contains.):
Susan, thankfully, arrives just in time to break the spell, but even her intervention can only hold for so long. Sammy finally, inevitably, goes on the bender that we all knew was coming... and of course, it's just as he's at the point of an irretrievable tumble over the edge that he gets his reprieve - in the form of a task. Sammy has to snap out of his drunken stupor and immediately rush off... to defuse a bomb and render England's green and pleasant land safe once again for British children and countryfolk to wander to and fro.
However, it's not a sun-dappled patch of heather to which Sammy must fly; his task is much more diabolically complicated. A pair of bombs have fallen on Chesil Bank, a 20-mile stretch of seashore consisting of nothing but loosely shifting pebbles, like so many marbles in a heap. The first bomb is Stuart's assignment, the second is Sammy's. This clip (a bit of a spoiler, I should warn you) leads into a masterfully suspenseful, brilliantly assembled sequence in which Sammy mans up and faces an all-or-nothing challenge: neuter the bomb and, in the process, shove all that self-doubting, whiny, mewling, sob-story crap behind you so that you can get on with your life... or get blown to bits! Well, when you put it that way, the choice becomes stark, crystal clear.
That's the gist of it then - the wartime period piece atmosphere, the literary quality of the script, fine attention to film-making detail and subtle, respectfully intelligent psychological insights that don't have to be made so glaringly obvious are all just bonuses on what is essentially a summons for men to overcome some of the pitfalls of mid-life manhood: to not let old hurts, thwarted ambitions, romantic troubles or the allure of drunken escapism render us irrelevant before old age and the march of time make it unavoidable anyway. It's also quite fun to watch this film after one has seen Black Narcissus, which features the male and female leads from The Small Back Room in very memorable and significant support roles.
We're getting pretty close to the end of the Archers on Criterion - just one more left to go, and then a Michael Powell solo project (if it's ever proper to apply that term to a film) made years later. The Small Back Room is probably not the ideal place to start if you want to dig into their filmography - I'd recommend watching them in order like I did! - but it's a good place to visit if you need to work out some kinks in your machinery, bounce a few ideas off of some like-minded fellows, step away from the careerists and the women folk for awhile and steady out your nerves.
Next: Kind Hearts and Coronets
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