Friday, August 7, 2009
Film Powell and Pressburger's The Small Back Room Is a Lonely Little Beast of a Movie
Posted by Michael Atkinson on Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 10:43 AM
But immediately thereafter, switching studios and getting a little tired of sweeping dreaminess, the pair made The Small Back Room (1949), a hand-sized Brit-noir delirium that virtually sits in the sweaty lap of a disaffected, one-footed munitions expert (David Farrar) who battles depression and wild alcoholism during the war as he's called upon to defuse a particularly insidious kind of German boobytrap bomb. The film is famous for the darkling, Magritte-ish haunted-by-booze hallucination scene, but the generalized vibe is as hyperliterate, thoroughly grown-up and intensely imagined as any of the team's more famous shots in the dark. Surely this lonely little beast of a movie is one of cinema's great renditions of self-loathing, but it's also a vital addition to the portrait gallery that Powell and Pressburger crafted of mid-century British life in all of its temperate wisdom and sharp-eyed wartime detail.
The Small Back Room plays on Sunday as part of Film Forum's Brit Noir series, which begins today and continues through mid-September.
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