Brit Noirs

It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) dir: John Hamer

The opening titles are accompanied by a mini-overture by Georges Auric. We expect to see something dramatic. Then the music modulates to something more forgiving and intimate, and there is the movie already in a nutshell.


The first shot is of a cul-de-sac ending in a church. The church has had the upper part of its spire removed, as thousands did. As a child I was told that this was the reduce the chances of it being hit by a doodlebug (flying bomb) and even then I thought it was not very Christian. After all, a church was more likely to be unoccupied at night than the surrounding terraced houses which would otherwise take the hit.

Then in succession we see the closed Tube station, that it is starting to rain, and the patrolling copper dons his rain-cape. We focus on one house in the street. The father (Edward Chapman), sees his daughter (Susan Shaw) coming home at dawn in a smart open-tourer and he looks concerned. The car drives off past three men in trilbies sheltering at a coffee-stand. They move off and the stall's owner does the football pools. In the stop-press of his evening edition it says that a prisoner has escaped from Dartmoor (England's harshest prison).

Now the real action of the movie commences. In one of the few scenes set outside the East End location we see the escapee tumble down a railway embankment. Next we view the morning Sunday paper where the escape is the main headline.

So within three minutes we have enjoyed the opening titles and the main plotline (the prison escapee) and two subsidiary plotlines (the wayward daughter and the three petty crooks) have all been established. This pace is maintained throughout the movie.

What genre is this film? I have seen it called both a Film Noir and a soap. Certainly the main plotline is Noir, but the mis-en-scene owes more to French poetic-realism (Carne, Renoir, Duvivier) than to American crime dramas. The plot trigger is Tommy Swann's (John McCallum's) prison break. It took me a few viewings to really appreciate the "black hole" at the heart of this film. What drove Swann to break out? Because he had been flogged, and was terrified of being flogged again. Flogging is judicial torture and was abolished in UK prisons in 1948, a year after our movie was released. It may thus be seen as a "protest" movie, though only implicitly so, at a time when the public mood had changed and the time was ripe for reform. In our "prison" thread we have discussed several UK films that were explicitly or implicitly against hanging, and I have seen one which implicitly appealed for more sympathetic treatment of war-time deserters, but I am not aware of any other UK anti-flogging movies. As I say, this theme is not labored, but it is there at the core of the plot. When Swann violently knocks down Rose (Googie Withers), who has bravely been sheltering him at great risk, in his haste to flee, she excuses him because she knows he is "terrified". Her passion for him is long dead. She is helping him out of pity. At the end she is resigned to her dull marriage with Edward Chapman. They are the working-class equivalent of Celia Johnson and Cyril Raymond in "Brief Encounter" two years earlier.

In UK prisons, visitors have been known to smuggle sharp blades into the prison buried in a bar of soap. (I suppose they have x-ray scanning these days?). Here we have a sharp Noir theme buried in a different sort of soap. Our movie is a soap because it is a forerunner (and maybe a direct inspiration) of later TV soaps, especially the long-running "Eastenders", still going on BBC TV after more than 6000 episodes since 1985. Both are about working-class families, petty crooks, and other colorful characters in London's East End. Much more of the movie's time is spent with their romances, frustrations, and reconciliations, than with our Noir main plotline. The family stories are touching, but with John Hamer directing, never sentimental. The villains are more pathetic than evil.

This is a great movie, realistic and humane. Hamer was a master director who, because of alcoholism, made few films and died prematurely in poverty and neglect, as did Arthur La Bern, who wrote the novel on which it was based. (La Bern also wrote the novel on which Hitchcock's Frenzy is loosely based). Besides this one I recommend Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947) and The Long Memory (1953), which is a more straightforward Noir.