With Walls of Wire and Whisky

What would it be like to live in constant, unrelenting, physical pain? I'm lucky not to live with such a condition but the protagonist of 1949's The Small Back Room is not so fortunate. After films of famed visual splendour, The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, the directing duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger turned to this small film noir about one man's struggle with pain and mortal fear while doing his job and living his life. There are a couple creative decisions in the film that don't quite hold water, but mainly it's impressive.

David Farrar and Kathleen Byron star in the film, the two having appeared together in Black Narcissus. Byron had the more interesting role in that film, here it's Farrar who takes centre stage as Sammy, a bomb squad and weapons technician on the home front during World War II. He has a prosthetic limb that causes him constant pain and he struggles with the urge to get blind drunk in order to manage it. Though, as he says, the whisky doesn't make the pain go away, it only makes him care about it less.

Byron is Susan, his steady, supportive girlfriend, at least until they have a row, which I consider one of the film's weak points. Her motivation for it isn't at all clear after she'd stood by him for so long. It's not exactly a movie about alcoholism, in fact no-one's telling Sammy he ought to go cold turkey, just that he oughtn't drink for the wrong reasons. A surrealistic sequence in which he struggles not drink a special bottle of scotch he'd been saving for celebrating the end of the war is interesting in itself but sits oddly with the rest of the film. I suppose The Red Shoes makes a similar abrupt shift from procedural to phantasmagoria but it doesn't quite work here. Maybe because The Red Shoes, after all, is about two sides of the same coin; art as it's made and art as it takes effect on the mind of the audience and artist.

The Small Back Room is better in scenes where Sammy is negotiating with military brass with outdated and bureaucratic attitudes or when he's confronting the deadly, technical problems of the booby trapped canisters Germans have been dropping on England. The scenes between Farrar and Byron are mostly quite lovely, too. We should all be so blessed to have a stalwart and sensitive girl like Susan in our lives.

The Small Back Room is available on The Criterion Channel.