Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Small of the Back in a Small Front Room

The Small Back Room (1949)
directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

The British sentiment towards alcoholism in movies is to use the disease as shorthand for the unhappiness of Empire. On Masterpiece Theatre, in particular, at the height of that show’s powers, reach, and influence – which represents, in many ways, the apex of the British Empire’s hold on the world’s popular imagination, broadcast into millions upon millions of homes - the sad sons of emotionally frigid dynasties (Brideshead Revisited) and the abused wives of Kashmir generals (The Jewel in the Crown) were hopeless, but almost always sympathetic, drunks. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were certainly capable of a little political propaganda every now and again, but taken as a whole, few directors’ peripheral works are as consistently surprising and rewarding as P & P’s.

The Small Back Room is a study in wartime office politics, a thriller about dismantling Nazi bombs, and probably the first example I can name in British cinema of an unmarried couple happily sharing a life together in the same small London apartment. The protagonist is an alcoholic in a decade when there was barely a word for it, an admirable man with the cruel habit of pushing his caring, loving partner away. It sounds like someone Anthony Hopkins might play today, which would hardly be cause for recommendation. Instead, Powell and Pressburger play the story for what it is: a romance, reckless and swooning and so full of life and beauty that it need not concern Nazis, the war, or even alcoholism at all.