Typed by
Linda Cupples
On The Small Back Room
(Comparing the book to the film)
By: Raymond Durgnat
Originally published in Powell, Pressburger and Others. ed Ian Christie, 1978.
The hero of Nigel Balchin's novel is afflicted with alcoholism and a tin leg, ravaged by a case of conscience about a defective gun his boss is pushing, and stalemated by his own imperceptiveness about bureaucratic intrigue; finally he must defuse a German booby-tap bomb. He's also the narrator, and as such gives to understand that he's unhandsome, over the hill, unimpressive of stature and culpably indulgent to moods of self-pity. This narration must reveal to us much that the narrator can demonstrate but not state: Sammy's stiff-upper-lip understatements, unemotional statements of emotion (reminiscent of Orwell), his scrupulous team spirit (of his colleagues, it's 'speak no evil'), his excessive self depreciation (of his heroism he sees only the inadequacy, the mistakes, sees admiration as kindness). We must realize what our narrator does not, e.g. that a senior bureaucrat is sounding him out for promotion, that the colleagues he loyally praises are delinquent, etc. Despite a rather mawkish subtheme about Sammy's be-medalled brother, Balchin expertly achieves a kind of ironic narration (the narrator conveys to the reader crucial information of which he himself is unaware). Such ironies represent a major literary mode and remind us (a) how seriously Brecht underestimated the flexible intricacy of partial alienations within mainstream bourgeois realism; (b) the inadequacy of merely linguistic, literal readings of literary texts; (c) the effectiveness of unstated norms as deconstructions of explicit meanings; and (d) the incompleteness of texts unreferred to a cultural, extra-linguistic, context. The transformation of sign (and sign-cluster, or associative chain) by structure (relationship) is exemplified by Balchin's smooth use of circumstantial detail as thematic counterpointing; e.g. a man in a trilby talking to himself (paralleling the principal narrative as a slightly 'mad' soliloquy), the Train Game (the cynical truths Sammy can't even think of his colleagues are paraphrased, catharted and lost, by discussing strangers in trains), the various dream and drunken states in which he sees but doesn't understand the truths his reality-sense skips. The novel ends greyly, Sammy's penultimate heroism may give his soul some private ease, but there's no guarantee that it'll trigger off a tonic aggressivity against bureaucratic creepy-crawlies.
Powell and Pressburger's film works hard to retain most of the book's many plot-strands and sub-issues, but changes the balance between them. David Farrar's dominating physiognomy and presence necessitate a correspondingly more forceful bitterness or neurosis; the film all but recentres on his alcoholism, inspiring the paroxysmatic dream-sequence with gigantic whisky bottle. The book's feeling against 'the bloody silly way that everything was arranged' is softened, although never quite eclipsed, and a fire-eating one-eyed General (the anti-Blimp) finally presents Rice with his very own research unit. The omission of an intervening NCO puts Sammy in a more heavily paternalistic relationship with an OR's marital troubles. The vignetted Welsh doctor illustrates how P & P can flatten Balchin's extroverted asperities. The book's brief references to xenophobia (are foreigners spies?) are built up (wartime London abounds in ex-allied troops) only to end amiably. Interestingly, P & P ignore most growth points for an auteurist version of Balchin's text (e.g. 'Taylor was in his little den with a watchmaker's glass in his eye', 'this colour filter thing').
Remarkably faithful in indicating the book's multiple plot elements and major themes, the film nonetheless alters its careful equilibrium between the two 'friendly enemies', Sammy and the system, both, in different ways, half-crippled and half-dotty, but ultimately viable. It's poignant that Balchin's Rice's nerves fail just as he must unscrew the boobytrap; and it's this failure that Sammy dwells on (though without self-pity or evasiveness). In the film Rice conquers his nerves, and the bomb, alone. The novel's version permits more intricate, intimate connections between psyche and predicament; and when these inadequacies are (1) incarnated by the powerful Farrar, (2) weakened, and (3) eclipsed by dipsomania with a capital D, the story subtly but pervasively loses its original impetus. The issues tend to interrupt rather than support each other; one is never quite certain what kind of detail to look for as a scene begins: P&P have disobeyed Hitchcock's injunction to 'Clarify! Clarify!', cherishing instead realistic sophistication (Sue helps Sammy resist drink by offering him one. It's when she isn't there to allow him one that he can't refuse it!). Given the mass audience of the time, a certain disorientation was compounded by P & P's mixture of terse story pointing, an oppressively gloomy atmosphere, and a slightly unorthodox story line. To this conjunction of factors we attribute the film's mixture of critical success and financial failure.
The novel's first person perspective might have suggested a subjective camera and certain 'impressionistic' effects (given, for example, the behind-the-closing-eyelid viewpoint P & P so splendidly perpetrated in A Matter of Life and Death). But given such a topic, an impressionist stress would be irrelevant and distracting, and P & P quite rightly decide that in this case the functional equivalent of any first person impressionism is expressionism. If impressionism centres on perception and expressionism on psychic resonance, both involve mind's-eye-views; and even if, at the extremes at which they are often described, they seem opposite strategies, they can also shade into one another. And while the story attenuates Balchin's socially critical stoicism, the film's style paraphrases it by atmosphere. What the film loses in crisp narrative impetus, it makes up by a kind of congestion of atmospheres evoking film noir at its intensest, i.e. Where it shades into expressionism. Thus P & P's film hybridises a stiff upper lip and an expressionist style. The latter does double duty: for Sammy's moods and for blacked-out London. Thus the film brings a noir oppressiveness to social reality, without using crime, neurosis or the notion of an underworld as distraction or scapegoat, and belongs to the small and select group of films noirs whose flagship is Citizen Kane.
Faces moving through alternately opposite spotlights in dark rooms; shadow webs from camouflage netting, window sticky tape or elevator grilles; movements now tarry, now knifelike; the sudden cut-ins of a white cat or of abruptly-changed facial expressions uneasy depths half-obscured by darkness; and then all but-unique absence of background music, and an off-on noise blitz, achieves an oppressiveness as massive as Lang's; but this is a world of irregularities, of huddles concavities and convexities, of varied angles, of rounded forms. As Campbell Dixon (Daily Telegraph) noted, 'Vital conversations take place in offices while automatic drills split the ear and pedestrians pound the grating just above. Almost the only noises we don't hear in this tale of wartime London are those of sirens and guns.' But with the climax we're plunged into an equally relentless décor, the quiet glittering spaces of the beach on which Sammy tackled the unexploded bomb, like a little cylinder of concentrated blackness. So sharp a discontinuity runs counter to the craftsman's wisdom of the time; initially, perhaps, dissatisfying, as far as a smooth intensity of mood is concerned, it becomes, on reflection, intriguingly ambiguous. Have the evil shadow retreated into the weapon, into a blessedly definite and obvious enemy of contrast? Or do the black and silver worlds finally merge into the film's locale, the dull grey shots of the South Bank (site of the old Shot Tower and the Festival-to-come)? However hesitatingly one advances such an exegesis, one can't put it past authors who earlier contrasted a Technicolour reality with a Socialist utopia in monochrome. There are other deft games with structure: the 'Jerry thermos' with which Stuart tests Sammy's clear-headedness echoes (1) the Highland Whisky which is his inner demon, (2) the final Bomb, and (3) the Shot Tower. The bottle itself becomes a terse paradox. Susan leaves it in Sammy's flat to celebrate V-Day; it's a constant temptation and a constant hope - that one day reality will justify intoxication. The Celtic fringe is still with us: science's painkilling pill didn't work, but Highland whisky helps Sammy not to mind the pain. The officer who summons Sammy to his test of nerve is named 'Stuart'; the venue, if somewhat displaced (North Wales), is still a part of the wild mountain fringe, of an un-English wildness.
Certain themes and scenes are little masterpieces of quick exposition: the oblique and delicate 'triangle' between Stuart, Sammy and Susan (a plot non sequitur), the decisive committee meting about the dud gun. P & P remain the only director's to lyricise Kathleen Byron's unique mixture of idealism, propriety and sharp, wild warmth; she seems to me an icon of the era. The timing of dramatic beats is strange and masterly: close-ups of a white cat suddenly introduce a domestic tempolessness, while P & P know just how darkness transforms tempo. The DTs sequence introduces a gigantic whisky bottle but, just as we brace ourselves for the climax of the nightmare, the sequence ejects us into a different reality (the telephone summons Sammy to confront his 'dark tower'-in miniature.)
Conceivably P & P (rather than Balchin) had a certain moral in mind. Somehow British 'spirit' has become a little ingrown; it needs an old-fashioned directness, like the General's. Not that things are quite so simplistic. Pinker, the sour-lipped, Machiavellian bureaucrat, is a man of action, while Sammy's friendly colleague (the young Jack Hawkins, smiling oddly like Kenneth More's Bader) is not. From one angle, the film is a third reflection on Britain's powers of self-renewal, alongside Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death. From another angle, it's the first of the more anxious-state-of-British films like The Man in the White Suit and Man in the Sky. It's also one of several touching on relationships between science and wartime loyalty. Ustinov's eupeptic School for Secrets and Michael Anderson's The Dam Busters both celebrate, in different ways, a slightly surprising harmony of scientists and services. A counterstrain of films (the Boultings' Seven Days to Noon and Suspect, also based on a Balchin novel, and Derden-Relph's The Mind-Benders) fears scientists' objectivity quickly becoming aloof arrogance and treason. The nexus of feelings, too complex to unravel here, involves not only the utopian and leftist leanings of '30s intellectuals, but residues from another moral elitism. H.G. Wells' 'Open Conspiracy', The urge to over-'auteurise' P & P could lead one to celebrate the film's virtuosos strangeness at the expense of its middle of the road, down to earth qualities, and the massive shot of realism in its 'poetic realism'. The little cameos of Pinker intriguing, with his paradoxically exhilarating venom, distills a philosophy into a face with a vivid veracity that out-documentaries any documentary (which is, after all, a major function of fiction). It's all these 'intersections' between private, public and 'poetic' worlds which give this film the restless changing intensity that rewards innumerable viewings, and makes it, in the end, not a 'story one follows', but a sensibility in which one bathes.
1978
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