gavin6942 As the Germans drop explosive booby-traps on Britain in 1943, the embittered expert who'll have to disarm them fights a private battle with alcohol.While this film is about World War II and a man's struggles with alcohol (as noted in the plot summary), this is not what I particularly enjoyed about the film. I thought it was most interesting because it showed the scientists behind the scenes. Whether it was isolating a gas or something else, it was nice to see this aspect.The point is made that a politician had never seen an adding machine before. This could be taken in many ways, but for my purpose I think it is neat to focus on these men because their creations are what move war (or society) forward. Countless movies depict war, but very few show the men and women who design the airplanes or other devices.

mark.waltz I certainly can see why some people refer to this movie as a small masterpiece. I did not go into it expecting big things like the previous Powell/Pressburger classics "Black Narcissus" and "The Red Shoes". However, rather than find this to be an interesting psychological drama about one man's battle with alcohol due to pressures in his professional life and a handicap that has obviously made him bitter, I found a rather claustrophobic, talkie drama that for the most part failed to hold my interest and left me scrambling to find my way back when all of a sudden things began to really happen. The sudden appearance of a giant booze bottle overshadowing its leading man (David Farrar) reminded me of things that audiences had already seen on screen in films prior to this: Ray Milland's withdrawal in "The Lost Weekend" and Gregory Peck's nightmares in "Spellbound". Having been bored for 90 minutes when this came up, I found myself chuckling at it. But then it got serious when the film began to deal with Farrar's profession and all the chat that had gone on before: defusing a bomb found on the beach. This comes in the last ten minutes of the film, and is as nail biting as everything else before was sleep inducing. Had the first 75% of the film been more like this and filled with less exposition, I would certainly find it a masterpiece.

writers_reign Nigel Balchin, a woefully neglected novelist, one of the finest British writers of the mid 20th century, wrote two novels against the backdrop of World War 2, his masterpiece Darkness Falls From The Air, written, set in and published during the London Blitz in 1941 and The Small Back Room, published two years later in 1943. Had I been involved in the adaptation of novel to screen the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger would have been way down my list of candidates if even on the list at all for their penchant for fantasy, faerie-like romance and off-centre plotting does not lend itself to a story rooted in realism. Having said that they manage to make something of a half-decent fist of it with the help of two outstanding leads in David Farrar as boffin Sammy Rice, who, some years before the outbreak of war had a foot amputated and replaced with a tin one and Kathleen Byron as his live-in lover, whipping-girl and colleague in the hush-hush department devoted to shortening the war. As a real-life scientist Balchin's day job means his novels reek with authenticity not least when satirising the Civil Servants who got under his skin; Jack Hawkins grabs his role as R.B. Waring by the scruff of the neck and becomes the oleaginous character more interested in 'selling' a suspect new weapon to the army than in the lives of the men who will have to use it. The climax of sorts involves a fiendish German explosive device tricked out to resemble a thermos flask and it is left to Rice to dismantle it. Both Farrar and Byron had appeared in the previous Powell-Pressburger effort the wildly overrated Black Narcissus and here they more than redeem themselves. A small pleasure.

Ray Girvan This is a wonderful movie, ahead of its time. The filming has the intense chiaroscuro of monochrome at its best, Kathleen Byron is astonishingly beautiful (even more so than in Black Narcissus), and the undertones are dark and very modern. Susan and Sam (the pain-ridden hero) have no idealised relationship; the film is uncompromising about Sam's alcoholism and, remarkably for its time, clear in its implication that Sue and Sam live together despite being unmarried. There are also many nice well-observed details, such as the scientist who embarrasses a visiting minister by knowing the answer to a sum faster than the calculator they are supposed to be demonstrating, the snoozing officer in the War Room, and the laid-back Strang who clearly is intensely attracted to Sam. I just keep watching this and finding more to see.