"A failure in its day, The Small Back Room takes it for granted that the British war effort was not just a fine hour but an opportunity for Civil Service intrigue. Moreover, this war is an ordeal seemingly designed to test and torture the repressed emotions of the central character, Sammy Rice, a wounded romantic, a drunk with a false leg, who is the nation's best dismantler of insidious enemy mines washed up on England's pebbly shores. The iconographic rhyming of metal legs, mysterious bombs and hallucinatory bottles of booze is what allows Michael Powell to mate the genres of stiff upper lip and booby-trapped hard-on. The small back room is a place where boffins work, but it is also the prison where libido lives.
"This is David Farrar's best movie: nearly a star, he would lapse into glowering Hollywood villains. Powell understood his darkness and put it next to the burning eyes of Kathleen Byron; their glances of desire are like a fuse and a flame, trying to touch. (Just as one hopes some bombs won't go off, there is another yearning to explode.) There are other familiar English faces, not least Jack Hawkins as a smiling Whitehall crawler; "a Guest" (booming out bogus Britishness even then); and the heart-rending Cyril Cusack, one of Ireland's greatest actors, not quite 'romantic' enough for the movies, the industry said, but never better as the man whose life and speech are coming apart from the terrible, delicate tension of opening unexploded bombs. His performance here is the embodiment of supporting acting, contributing to the mood of central performances, and giving us a life in a few small scenes." David Thomson