K athleen Byron and David Farrar were unforgettable presences in the 1947 Powell and Pressburger classic Black Narcissus , playing a hysterical nun and the taciturn colonial agent with whom she is peevishly infatuated. The film-makers reunited these remarkable performers two years later for this intimate, intense wartime drama thriller; brilliant on the emotional misery, low-level dread and petty office politics of wartime government. It takes place mostly in London’s noirish darkness and rain, except for the sensational final sequence in the bright sunlight of Chesil beach in Dorset.
‘Rejecting hatred and fear’: why Powell and Pressburger’s weird, confounding films are perfect for our times Read more Adapted from an autobiographical novel by military scientist Nigel Balchin, The Small Back Room is a work that shows the film-makers pushing – brilliantly – at the conventions and constraints of a regular wartime period drama. Any number of British directors might have wanted to take on this story. But the Powell and Pressburger authorial flourishes are irresistible.
Farrar plays a role not so very far from his Mr Dean in Black Narcissus, moody and saturnine. He is Sammy, a civilian scientist, or back-room “boffin”, working for a Prof Mair (Milton Rosmer) in 1943 in an ad hoc research department set up by the war office. Sammy is depressive and an alcoholic, driven to despair by incessant pain from a prosthetic foot which, through vanity and stubbornness, he refu.
