Hour of Glory

TCM had a spotlight late in 2024 on the professional partnership of Michael Powell and Michael Pressburger. This gave me the chance to record a couple of movies I hadn't seen before, as well as one I had seen but hadn't done a post on according to a search of the blog. That latter film is The Small Back Room.

The movie starts off with a title card telling us the setting is London, 1943, which of course is smack in the middle of World War II. A man walks into a building that looks like it could be used by the War Department or some other military-adjacent organization. The man walking into the building is indeed military: army captain Richard Stuart (Michael Gough), and he's looking for explosives expert Sammy Rice (David Farrar). The Nazis have apparently come up with some new type of booby trap that's killed several civilians, and Capt. Stuart thinks that perhaps Sammy would come up with some idea of how the Germans may have set the traps so that future types of this bomb can be defused without going off and killing anybody.

This is a welcome change for Sammy, who has a difficult personal life. Sammy isn't fighting in the war, which is entirely because he has a prosthetic foot. Worse, that foot causes him all sorts of pain, and the painkillers the doctors prescribe don't do anything for him. As a result of not being able to serve in active duty Sammy takes pity on himself; as a result of the pain, Sammy has turned to drink and become a raging alcoholic much to the chagrin of his girlfriend and co-worker Susan (Kathleen Byron).

It's also not only personal life that's tough for Sammy. He works for a company that tries to design new weapons systems as part of the war effort. One thing that the War Department is working on is something called the Reeves gun, that may not work out in the field as well as is needed for the soldiers to be able to use it effectively and survive. This is leading to all sorts of political infighting. It doesn't help that Sammy's boss Waring (Jack Hawkins) is basically useless, trying to flirt with the secretaries while bamboozling the politicians and taking credit for things that really should be the responsiblity of Sammy and the other men in the laboratories. It's all amost enough to make Sammy start drinking the bottle of Scotch he's got ready for victory day.

And then the climax comes when Sammy gets a telegram from Stuart that another of the German booby traps has been found at the coast without having gone off, which will give Sammy and Stuart a chance to figure out what the Germans have done. Except that Sammy gets to the coast only to find out that one of the two booby traps when off while Stuart was trying to defuse it, killing Stuart and forcing Sammy to defuse the other one with no help from anybody else.

As I was watching The Small Back Room for the first time in many years, I realized that in some ways it's almost two movies in one, somewhat along the lines of Just the Way You Are that I did a post on a couple of days ago. However, I think that Powell and Pressburger handle the two disparate parts much better. It helps that the material is stuff that naturally lends itself to dark suspense, and that Farrar is up to the task of dealing with it.

The Small Back Room is a smaller film than what one might normally think of when it comes to Powell and Pressburger, and as a result, it's a bit of a shame that this one isn't nearly as well remembered as the pair's other movies. It definitely deserves to be better known.