Tripwire Reviews Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room On 4K Blu Ray From 3 June

Haunted By His Failure

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows reviews Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room on 4K restored Blu Ray from 3 June…

The Small Back Room
Directors: Michael Powell/ Emeric Pressburger
Stars: David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Jack Hawkins

As part of StudioCanal’s ongoing restoration of their British cinema catalogue, The Small Back Room by Powell and Pressburger, which celebrates its 75^th anniversary, is getting a 4K restoration on Blu Ray this June as well as getting a showing at London’s BFI this week.

The Small Back Room deals with the doomed love affair between bomb disposal expert Sammy Rice (Farrar) and secretary Susan (Bryon), who works for the oleaginous RB Waring (Hawkins). Rice suffers from alcoholism and a lack of self-worth as someone who never put himself in danger on the frontline.

The Small Back Room is a Powell and Pressburger curio, not quite as cohesive or as impressive as something like The Black Narcissus or A Matter Of Life And Death. It is well made as you would expect with some very impressive early visual effects work particularly in the scene where Sammy’s alcoholic hallucinations get the better of him. But it doesn’t quite hold together as well as their more superior efforts.

Farrar is excellent as is Bryon, with the pair’s relationship bolder and more contemporary than many other films of the same vintage. He is a man haunted by his own sense of failure while Susan is obviously a woman who is capable of more than just acting as Waring’s subordinate. Hawkins is wonderfully patronising here too and the rest of the cast including Cyril Cusack as a fellow scientist and a small cameo from Sid James as a barman show some very canny casting decisions.

Visually it is very impressive as its elegant shadows and haunting silhouettes make for  a striking tale. There are also onscreen scenes of painterly surreality, something that the pair excelled at throughout their career.

The extras, one of which goes into detail as to how they pieced the film back together for this release, add a lot of extra context to the film. There is a fascinating Channel 4 documentary from back in 1995 made by Pressburger’s grandson, fellow director Kevin Macdonald, examining his relative’s circuitous path to filmmaking with a particularly peripatetic existence. Jewish émigré Pressburger was born in Hungary but he embraced the British lifestyle with a rare vigour.

The Small Back Room isn’t a classic film but as a British noir, it is an example of how even a flawed Powell and Pressburger production was still head and shoulders over many of their cinematic contemporaries. For aficionados of cinema history, this is definitely a version that should be on their shopping list as StudioCanal have again done a wonderful job of restoring this for 4K release.

JOEL MEADOWS